Much the same licence is accorded to the courtesan, as long as she is beautiful. She can, if she chooses, be rude to men who ask her for a dance. She can make fun of them in public. She rampages through life in the pride of her youth; she can pick and choose. Her charm and her beauty are her capital. She makes a bargain with the world of routine and wealth, the world that sells cotton and builds empires, the industrious, unflagging world that asks in its spare time to be amused. To such a one the world says: “Here are two pictures. Make your choice. You may stay all your life a suburban girl. You will go to subscription dances and get kissed furtively in the passage by smarmy, over-dressed young men, who will boast to their companions of your surrender. One of them you will select to take you to a cinema, and, as a payment, you will allow him to hold your hand. And to one of these young men you will eventually become engaged. You may be very much in love with him, or you may be seeking an escape from the uncongenial surroundings of your home. But in either case the result at the end of three years’ time will be the same. The blue bird will have flown away. You will be a mother and a housewife. You will have settled down to the humdrum of suburban matrimony. Your husband will no longer be satisfied with your company in the evening. He will bring in with him those tedious friends of his who were once your dance partners, those tedious friends grown smarmier and softer with the years. And you will sit sewing in a corner while they discuss the political situation and the latest murder case. There will be not a great deal of money. You will be clothed, not dressed. Your prettiness will soon pass, because you will be unable to give it the right setting of georgette and crêpe-de-chine. And you will gaze enviously at the gay windows of Oxford Circus. Before you are thirty, before one of your hairs is grey, your personal life will be at an end. And you will never have lived. You will be safe, that is all. There will be food to eat, a fire to sit before, a roof above you when you have come to the weakening hours of age. “And this is what we bring you in exchange. We bring you the opportunity of living to their full the best years of your life, eighteen to thirty-three. You will dance night after night at the Savoy. Poiret will design your dresses; you will drive through the London streets in the deep comfort of a Daimler; you will meet men of the world, brilliant, interesting men: barristers, financiers, doctors, artists. You will live romance. You will love deeply, you will suffer deeply. You will pass from the extreme of happiness to the extreme of pain. You will love no longer than love pleases. You will be the swinging pendulum. You will never rest. You will fulfil yourself.” “And afterwards?” The world shrugs its shoulders.