"Thees? You do not know eet. Eet ees the enemy of all the headache, of all the heartache, of all the bad nerve." For answer Mary drained the glass, and when her visitors left her they turned no key upon their exit. So, slowly, through all those early days, and through the days that immediately followed them, the spell of the situation worked. There was infamy, there was torture. The unending procession of visitors--clerks, drummers, car-conductors, teamsters, gamesters, thieves, brothers in the fraternity of lust, equals in the night of horror, mostly drunken, nearly all unclean of body and everyone filthy of mind--the green government note was their certificate of qualification, the money, however acquired, constituted their right to those counterfeits which the house of Rose Légère was maintained to sell. For that note, themselves the chattels of conditions, they might caress or beat; for that, they might take whatever their hearts demanded. Was the slave wounded? Was she ill? Was she heartbroken? She must smile; she must be one woman to all men. She must receive the blows with laughter, the ribaldry, the insults and the curses as wit. She must pass from this to that--and she must not care. And yet Mary, who was Violet now, could do nothing but take as final the conclusion that Rose had drawn for her. To return home, even if she had the money, would be impossible, because to do so would be to court her father's anger and her mother's shame, with no hope of either pardon or justification. To go out into the cheerless street that sent its growling echoes up to her curtained window would be, she was assured, to deliver herself to arrest or starvation. She was ignorant and young. With no knowledge of the laws and the charities of the monster town, she saw only that the former, in uniform, was a back-door friend of her keepers, and she was told that the latter never helped before they first publicly burned upon their victims' brows the thenceforth ineradicable brand of infamy. Without there was, at the least, hunger, drudgery and disgrace; at the most, starvation, jail, death. Within, where fresh wounds meant but little, there obtained, under only a velvet-pawed tyranny, a tolerable democracy of disrepute, an equality of degradation, where food, at any rate, and shelter and raiment were certain, and where old scars and fresh bruises were hidden from the world: the price was no more than supine acquiescence. Anything like financial independence was, of course, impossible: the slaves of Rose Légère were as much slaves as any mutilated black man of the Congo, or any toil-cramped white man in a factory. Their wages were paid to the supervisor, their few belongings secretly searched for gratuities, and though one-half of each payment was, theoretically, the portion of the employé, rent and board and _lingerie_ demanded, and must needs secure, prices that left each woman hopelessly in debt to the mistress of the house.