If a girl in this country becomes a mistress, she must consent to be secluded, and cannot have her vanity completely satisfied for men here do not dare to honor their paramours by appearing with them in full view of the public, as they so often do in Continental Europe.
Many girls have in them a good deal of that principle or endowment of Nature which Ellice Hopkins calls the "black kitten" a sort of daredevil spirit which makes them indiscreet enough to try their hands at "sowing wild oats", and which lures them to play and frolic on dangerous ground, though they do not mean to go beyond certain limits.
Ellice Hopkins well says: "Do not you think it a little hard that men should have dug by the side of her foolish, dancing feet a bottomless pit, and that she cannot have her jump and fun in safety, and put on her fine feathers like the silly, bird-witted thing she is, without a single false step dashing her over the brink, and leaving her with the very womanhood dashed out of her?"
And yet vanity alone does not make them fall, for every girl values her chastity to such an enormous degree that no man could violate it without some subterfuge of love-making, deceit, bribery, or by the aid of intoxicants.
Seduction. Except in the company of the most debased profligates, from whom all sense of chivalry has long since departed, no man would for a moment dare to say that he had been the first to deprive a woman of her virtue; but such is the low degree of honor to which licentiousness has reduced many men, that they consider a girl who has once fallen, no matter how young and innocent, their legitimate prey, and eagerly avail themselves of the opportunity to be number two in helping her down to perdition. Once a girl has made a single misstep, every lustful man is against her to prevent her from rising, and keeps trampling her down and pitilessly leading her on until she can sink no lower.
In her descent she passes through the hands of many men, who, in the eyes of the world, appear to become baser and baser as the woman sinks lower and lower in her degrading calling. But in reality, by far the wickedest man is he who inflicted the first terrible injury, and next in order to him come those who complete his work of seduction by trampling out of her every vestige of womanhood.
What sensual man ever goes by preference to confirmed prostitutes when he has the choice of selecting the freshest and sweetest young girl who has just fallen?
And yet those who think themselves men allow such fellows to recount their detestable success with these attractive young girls without even feeling a desire to kick them out of their society. What conceivable excuse can be offered for the cowardly malefactors who complete the work of seduction initiated by the first fiend!
No one who is normally endowed with a sense of chivalric manliness, or who has any remnant of the true majesty of his sex, will for a moment admit to his friendship, or even companionship, the man who was the seducer, nor those who completed the irrevocable ruin, of a maiden who might have escaped the despair of an existence which must now, on their account, be terminated by the blistering anguish of social ostracism, shattered health, and a loathsome degradation, which, if it does not drive the pitiable victim to a suicide's grave, has yet removed her from every sweet influence which they themselves are permitted to enjoy without even any vigorous condemnation from the girl's own sex.
Mr. Lecky, the historian of European morals, says on this subject:
"When we reflect that the object of such a man is by the coldest and most deliberate treachery to blast the life of an innocent woman; when we compare the levity of his motive with the irreparable injury he inflicts; and when we remember that he can only deceive his victim by persuading her to love him, and can only ruin her by persuading her to trust him, it must be owned that it would be difficult to conceive a cruelty more wanton and more heartless, or a character combining more numerous elements of infamy and dishonor".