Into the houses of these women
come the husbands at evening, tired and uncommunicative, to eat hurriedly
and then go again into the streets or, the blessing of utter physical
exhaustion having come to them, to sit for an hour in stockinged feet
before crawling away to sleep and oblivion.
In these women is no light, no vision. They have instead certain fixed
ideas to which they cling with a persistency touching heroism. To the man
they have snatched from society they cling also with a tenacity to be
measured only by their love of a roof over their heads and the craving for
food to put into their stomachs. Being mothers, they are the despair of
reformers, the shadow on the vision of dreamers and they put the black
dread upon the heart of the poet who cries, "The female of the species is
more deadly than the male." At their worst they are to be seen drunk with
emotion amid the lurid horrors of a French Revolution or immersed in the
secret whispering, creeping terror of a religious persecution. At their
best they are mothers of half mankind. Wealth coming to them, they throw
themselves into garish display of it and flash upon the sight of Newport
or Palm Beach. In their native lair in the close little houses, they sleep
in the bed of the man who has put clothes upon their backs and food into
their mouths because that is the usage of their kind and give him of their
bodies grudgingly or willingly as the laws of their physical needs direct.
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