It was a detail that had escaped them, and presently, with his great patience, and his great sincerity, he said to them: “I’ll make you a proposition. You go and select two of the worst of these women you can find, and I’ll agree to take them into my home and provide for them until they can find some other home and some other way of making a living. And then you, each one of you, take one girl into your home, under the same conditions, and together we’ll try to find homes for the rest.” They looked at him, then looked at each other, and seeing how utterly hopeless this strange man was, they went away. XLVIII To be sure, that was in another day. Prostitution had not become a subject for polite conversation at the dinner table; pornographic vice commissions had not been organized and provided with appropriations so that their hearings might be stenographically reported and published along with the filthy details gathered in the stews and slums of cities by trained smut hunters; it had not yet been discovered that the marriage ceremony required a new introduction, based upon the scientific investigations of the clinical laboratory, and on the same brilliant thought that centuries ago struck the wise men of Bohemia, who, when the population increased too rapidly, prohibited marriages for a number of years that proved, of course, to be the most prolific the land had ever known. The new conception was created in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, by the necromancy of a striking phrase. I do not know who it is that had the felicity to employ it first in its present relation. I remember that long years ago, when as a boy I used to frequent the gallery of the theater, I sat rapt afar in the mystery and romance of life on the Mississippi while gazing on the scenes of Bartley Campbell’s melodrama “The White Slave.” I can call back now, with only a little effort of the imagination and the will, that wonderful pageant--the _Natchez_, the _Robert E. Lee_, the great steamboats I knew so well from Mark Twain’s book, the plantation hands, the darkies singing on the levee, the moonlight and the jasmine flower--and there was no David Belasco in those days to set the scene either, nor, for the imagination of youth, any need of one! And then the beautiful octoroon, so lily white and fragile that it should have been patent to all, save perhaps an immoral slave-holder, from the very first scene, that she had no drop of negro blood! And the handsome and cruel owner and master, with his slouch hat and top boots, and fierce mustache and imperial, taking her to her awful fate down the river! It was an old story Bartley Campbell used for his plot, a story which had for me an added interest, because my grandfather had told it to me out of his own southern experiences, in those far-off days when he had business that took him down the river to New Orleans. And it was a story which, for a while, in many variants of its original form, was told all over