"I hope he doesn't come here," she said
vigorously: "I should refuse to speak to him or have him at my table.
Outrageous! I can't make out why you take it so coolly. Mina Raff's a
rotten immoral woman; it doesn't matter how it's arranged. Why," she
gasped, "she can be no more than Peyton's mistress, no better than the
women on the street."
"That is so," he agreed. But his following question of the accepted
badness of mistresses and streetwalkers he wisely kept to himself. Were
they darker than the shadow cast by the inelastic institution of
matrimony? At one time prostitutes were greatly honored; but that had
passed, he was convinced, forever; and this, on the whole, he
concluded, was fortunate; for, perhaps, if prostitution were thoroughly
discredited, marriage might, in some Elysian future, be swept of most
of its rubbish. Houses of prostitution, mistresses, like charity,
absorbed and dissipated a great deal of the dissatisfaction inseparable
from the present misconceptions of love and society. The first move,
obviously, in stopping war was the suppression of such ameliorating
forces as the Red Cross; and, conversely, with complete unions,
infidelity would languish and disappear.
* * * * *
He thought of this further in the darkened theatre to which, driven by
his growing curiosity, he had gone to see Mina Raff in the leading part
of a moving picture.
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