They do not love, they sell, instead, their bodies in the market place and
cry out that man shall witness their virtue because they had had the joy
of finding one buyer instead of the many of the red sisterhood. A fierce
animalism in them makes them cling to the babe at their breast and in the
days of its softness and loveliness they close their eyes and try to catch
again an old fleeting dream of their girlhood, a something vague, shadowy,
no longer a part of them, brought with the babe out of the infinite.
Having passed beyond the land of dreams, they dwell in the land of
emotions and weep over the bodies of unknown dead or sit under the
eloquence of evangelists, shouting of heaven and of hell--the call to the
one being brother to the call of the other--crying upon the troubled air
of hot little churches, where hope is fighting in the jaws of vulgarity,
"The weight of my sins is heavy on my soul." Along streets they go lifting
heavy eyes to peer into the lives of others and to get a morsel to roll
upon their heavy tongues. Having fallen upon a side light in the life of a
Mary Underwood they return to it again and again as a dog to its offal.
Something touching the lives of such as walk in the clean air, dream
dreams, and have the audacity to be beautiful beyond the beauty of animal
youth, maddens them, and they cry out, running from kitchen door to
kitchen door and tearing at the prize like a starved beast who has found a
carcass.
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