ng them
marked attention, and are quick to accept invitations to the theater or
to walk or drive with him. If the girl is religious, he is not above
using the cloak of religion, expressing fondness for church and prayer
meetings and is frequently to be found at such places. When a girl's
confidence and affection have been won, it is a comparatively easy thing
to accomplish her ruin, by proposing an elopement. Her scruples and
arguments are easily overcome by the skilled deceiver, and trusting him
implicitly as her accepted lover, she unwittingly goes to her doom. When
they arrive in the city a mock marriage is performed, for there are
accomplices on every hand, and the child wife is taken into a house of
sin, which she has been told by her pretended husband is an elegant
boarding house.

Can you imagine any greater horror than that of this trusting child
wife, when she realizes she is a prisoner and a slave in that den of
shame? And such slavery! the blackest that has ever stained human
history. Shut up beyond the reach of friends--for no letter she may
write finds its way beyond the doors of her prison house. Should she
call a police officer the chances are he is receiving bribes from her
keeper and he will not help her to freedom. Is it strange that soon she
eagerly drinks the wine that is constantly offered her, and sometimes
actually forced down her throat, and smokes the cigarette with its
benumbing effect of opium and tobacco, so that under the influences of
these fatal drugs she may forget her awful fate and hasten her early
death, for surely no hell in the other world can be more dreadful than a
house of shame in this world.

And then good women and good men who see her poor painted face later
peering out between the lace curtains of her dread abode, or, if meeting
her on the street, draw away from her and say, "Oh! I guess she is there
because she wants to be."

This expression is one of the reasons that this condition has existed so
long unchanged. It is frequently made because of the ignorance of the
general public upon the subject. But the thought that when one sees a
woman in a life of sin, she is there because she likes it and wants to
be, has become so deeply engraved upon the human mind that it is
difficult to change it. Some people are conscientious in thinking this,
because they are ignorant. Others know better, but in order that they
may not feel called upon to take an active part against these
co