Frankness and truth are virtues seldom esteemed by women as desirable; rather are they qualities to be avoided. For this reason you regard me as a Sardanapalus, because I attended a ball at which the ballet girls of the Opera were present. You reproach me for that evening as if it were a crime, and you reproach me for commending those poor girls as if that were a still greater crime. I repeat it, give them wealth, and thereafter only their good qualities will be seen. But an insurmountable barrier has been raised by the aristocracy between the different social classes, so that neither class may discover how much alike are the happenings on each side of the barrier. I want to tell you the story of a ballet girl that I heard in this same shocking society. In a house in the rue Saint Honoré lived a poor woman who never left the little attic room which she rented at three francs a month. She had one daughter twelve years old, who was always neatly dressed, very demure, and extremely reserved in manner. This little girl went out three afternoons in the week and returned alone at midnight. It was known that she was a chorus girl at the Opera. One day she goes down to the porter’s room and asks for a lighted candle. It is given to her. The porter’s wife, surprised not to see her come downstairs again, climbs to the garret, finds the woman dead on her wretched pallet, and the little girl occupied in burning unread an enormous quantity of letters which she was taking from a large trunk. She says: “My mother died last night, and charged me to destroy all her letters without reading them.” This child has never known her mother’s real name; she is now absolutely alone in the world, without any resource but to act the vulture, the monkey, or the devil at the Opera.