go to my little girl: I'll
send it through Praddy and he'll pay it into her bank. Then I shan't
feel anxious about her.'"

"Mother! what a strange creature you are! Such a mixture of good and
bad--for I suppose it _is_ bad, I feel somehow it _is_ bad,
trafficking in women's bodies, as they put it sensationally. Towards
me you have always been compact of kindness; you took every
precaution to have me brought up well, out of knowledge of any
impurity; and well and modernly educated. You left me quite free to
marry whom I liked ... but ... but ... you stuck to this horrible
career..."

"Well, Vivie. I did. But did you make any great effort to turn me
from it? Besides, _is_ it horrible? I won't promise much for Berlin
and Buda-Pest or even Vienna, because I haven't been in those
directions for ever so long, and the Germans are reg'lar getting out
of hand, they are, working up for something. I dessay if you looked
in at the Warren Hotels in those places you might find lots to say
against 'em. But you couldn't say the places I supervise here and at
Roquebrune are so bad? _I_ won't stop your looking into 'em. The
girls are treated right down well. Looked after if they fall sick
and given every encouragement to marry well. I even call those two
places--I've giv' up me Paris house this ten years--I even call them
my 'marriage markets.' Ah! an' I've given in my time not a few
_dots_ to decent girls that had found a good husband _dans la
clientele_. Why they're no more than what you might call hotels a
bit larkier than what other Hotels are. I've never in all my twenty
years of Brussels management had a row with the police.... And as to
all this rot about the White Slave Traffic that you seem so excited
about ... well I'm not saying there's nothin' in it.... Antwerp,
Hamburg, Rotterdam--you'd hear some funny stories there ... but only
if you went as David Williams in your man's kit--My! what a wheeze
that's bin!... And from all they tell me, that place in South
America--Buenos Aires, is a reg'lar Hell. But ... God bless my soul
... there's nothin' to fuss about here. Our young ladies would take
on like anything if you forced them to go away from my care. It's
gettin' near the time when we close our Roquebrune establishment for
the summer, an' the girls'll all be goin' back to their homes in the
mountains and fattenin' up on new milk; still if you go there before
the middle of May you'll see things pretty much as they are in the