They call them demi mondaines and nymphs du pave in Paris, and it doesn’t sound so bad, but here a spade is called a spade with coarse brutality and vice doesn’t receive even a very thin coating of veneer.
Take a walk any night along the streets where women congregate—you know the kind of women I mean—and study the faces. Look for weakness, and strength, and character. Look for good and evil. You don’t have to be a mind reader, just a plain, ordinary, everyday sort of a man with average intelligence.
If you look for the outward signs of degradation in the uptown districts you’ll be disappointed; you’ll have to turn your face and your steps Batteryward to find that. Vice has a degrading and demoralizing influence and its victim, in following that unwritten law of nature that governs the universe, is ever on the downward path. In some cases it is a gentle descent, while in others it is simply a series of steps each one lower than the other, and at the last there is nothing but pity for the poor devils of women to whom no man lifts his hat or bows his head, and who cease to live in merely existing.
And for eight out of every ten there are eight men somewhere whose hands gave the push that sent them on the downhill road.
But once in a while—once in a very great while—justice
101
 comes to a man as it did in this case, and that’s the story.
 
She had such a superb figure that she once posed for a sculptor
Locked up securely in the City Prison like a rat is locked in a trap, or a dangerous beast is fastened behind iron bars, is a pretty little black-eyed French girl.
Julie, her name is, and those who see and talk to her find in her a great charm; a charm, that had she been placed in a different atmosphere or had the lines of her life been cast in different places, would have been so far-reaching as to make her a power. She had such a charming figure that she once posed for a sculptor. Many a woman’s hand has shaped the course of destiny in this world of ours, and the power behind the throne usually wears petticoats.
This Julie takes her imprisonment calmly, because she is a philosopher by force of circumstances. She knows the metal bars can resist her, consequently she doesn’t throw herself against them and there are no tears in her eyes because she can never cry again. She doesn’t know what they will eventually do to her and she doesn’t care. If it is decreed that she shall go forth free, good; then she will go. If it is decreed that for the rest of her life she shall be doomed to wear that narrow blue prison stripe, she will at least be fed and housed and cared for, and on rainy, stormy days she will be under shelter and not compelled to walk the streets with dripping skirts until the gray morning comes over the roof tops.
You see, she has the comforting creed of a fatalist—that what is to be will be, and that one thought is to her like a narcotic—she sleeps at nights.
102
Because of that she doesn’t hear the moans and sobs of the woman in the next cell, who has the feathery crime of petit larceny hanging over her head instead of murder. A mere trifle which means nothing more than a few weeks—or months at the most—in jail. A rest like the going away from the hot city streets when July comes, as the rich people do, or to the South when winter winds blow. A place where the thermometer always registers about the same and the meals come regularly, which is not a thing to be despised by anyone, much less a woman of the lower half.
If the life of this Julie were to be told year by year it would take a book of many thousands of pages, and the pathos, comedy and tragedy would be about evenly divided. You would have the tale of how she once asked a man if he had change of a $50 bill. Then when he pulled out his money she grabbed the roll, cried out: “Here comes the police,” and dashed into a hallway in the twinkling of an eye. It was a good joke and she spent the proceeds for a new dress, for she was of the kind who make even jokes profitable.
That she was saved from arrest many times was due to the fact that she stood in with the police, and she was considered to be one of the most successful stool pigeons in the business. She was born with the instinct of the hunter, and hunter she was. In her own inner circle, however, she was known as The Slasher, and was feared accordingly.
It came about in this way.
She and another woman of the streets were rivals in many ways. When they first met they took an instinctive dislike to each other. The other one was a blonde, tall and stately—the kind you read about in
103
 cheap novels. She was an English girl, and when it came to a knockdown and drag-out argument she was able to deliver the goods in fine shape. Their first quarrel was over nothing, and before it was finished the lady with the golden tresses had taken her French sister by the shoulders and flung her down an area bruising her badly.
The Latin blood in the black-eyed one boiled, and she cried out for revenge, which she proceeded to work up in a truly Latin manner. She made friends with her former enemy, said that she was in the wrong and was sorry for what had happened, and that she wanted to be forgiven. The blonde fell like a farmer before Hungry Joe, and they both went off to celebrate. The celebration consisted in tucking away many cocktails and highballs, and inside of two hours the British lady was a sodden wreck, and so helpless that she had to be carried to her room on the second floor rear of a house of no reputation.
Julie stayed with her long enough to pull out a razor and cut three gashes from the bridge of her nose across one cheek. Then she slipped out and went on her way as though nothing had ever happened to give her a moment’s worry.
That little stunt put the blonde out of business, in that section of the city, at least. It is said she went further downtown, where there is less of a premium on beauty and style.
Like other women of her caste Julie found it necessary to have a protector, and when she first appeared in the role of hunter she cast about for one who would suit—one who would fight her batt............