57. The experiences of Commenge in Paris are instructive on this point. “For many young girls,” he writes, “modesty has no existence; they experience no emotion in showing themselves completely undressed, they abandon themselves to any chance individual whom they will never see again. They attach no importance to their virginity; they are deflowered under the strangest conditions, without the least thought or care about the act they are accomplishing. No sentiment, no calculation, pushes them into a man’s arms. They let themselves go without reflexion and without motive, in an almost animal manner, from indifference and without pleasure.” He was acquainted with forty-five girls between the ages of twelve and seventeen who were deflowered by chance strangers whom they never met again; they lost their virginity, in Dumas’s phrase, as they lost their milk-teeth, and could give no plausible account of the loss.... A girl of fourteen, living comfortably with her parents, sacrificed her virginity at a fair in return for a glass of beer, and henceforth begun to associate with prostitutes. Another girl of the same age, at a local fête, wishing to go round on the hobby horse, spontaneously offered herself to the man directing the machinery for the pleasure of a ride.... In the United States, Dr. W. T. Travis Gibb, examining physician to the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, bears similar testimony to the fact that in a fairly large proportion of “rape” cases the child is the willing victim. “It is horribly pathetic,” he says, “to learn how far a nickel or a quarter will go towards purchasing the virtue of these children.”[59] 58. In round numbers nine tenths of the delinquent girls and three fourths of the delinquent boys come from the homes of the poor. Sixty-nine per cent of the girls and 38 per cent of the boys come from the lowest class, the “very poor”, the class in which there exists not merely destitution, but destitution accompanied by degradation, or destitution caused by degradation.... In Table 19 it appears that 31 per cent of the delinquent boys and 47 per cent of the delinquent girls before their appearance in court had lost one or both parents by death, desertion, imprisonment, or similar misfortune, and that they had not had the benefit of the wholesome discipline which normal family life affords.... These children come in many instances from homes in which they have been accustomed from their earliest infancy to drunkenness, immorality, obscene and vulgar language, filthy and degraded conditions of living....