Most of the girls to whom they are offered will not take them, but a good number do and, occasionally, the seed thus sown bears fruit.  Thus the woman who takes the card may come to Great Titchfield Street and be rescued in due course.  More frequently, however, she will give a false address, or make an appointment which she does not keep, or will say that it is too late for her to change her life.  But this fact does not always prevent such a woman from trying to help others by sending young girls who have recently taken to the trade to the Titchfield Street Refuge in the hope that they may be induced to abandon their evil courses.

Occasionally the Army has midnight suppers in its Regent Hall for these women, who attend in large numbers, perhaps out of curiosity.  At the last supper nearly 300 ‘swell girls’ were present and listened to the prayers and the exhortations to amend their lives.  Sometimes, too, the Officers attend them when they are sick or dying.  Once they buried one of the women, who died whilst under their care, holding a midnight funeral over her at their hall in Oxford Street.

It was attended by hundreds of the sisterhood, and the Major described the scene as terrible.  The women were seized with hysterics, and burst into shrieks and sobs.  They even tried to open the coffin in order to kiss the dead girl who lay within.

Amongst many other cases, I was informed of a black girl called Diamond, so named because she wore real diamonds on her dresses, which dresses cost over L100 apiece.  The Army tried to help her in vain, and wrote her many letters.  In the end she died in an Infirmary, when all the letters were found carefully hidden away among her belongings and returned to the Major.

The average number of rescues compassed, directly or indirectly, by the Piccadilly Midnight work is about fifty a year.  This is not a very great result; but after all the taking of even a few people from this hellish life and their restoration to decency and self-respect is well worth the cost and labour of the mission.  The Officers told me that they meet with but little success in the case of those women who are in their bloom and earning great incomes.  It can scarcely be otherwise, for what has the Army to offer them in place of their gaudy, glittering life of luxury and excitement?

The way of transgressors is hard, but the way of repentance is harder; at any rate, while the transgressor is doing well.  On the one hand jewels and champagne, furs and motors, and on the other prayers that talk of death and judgment, plain garments made by the wearer’s labour, and at the end the drudgery of earning an honest livelihood, perhaps as a servant.  Human nature being what it is, it seems scarcely wonderful that these children of pleasure cling to the path of ‘roses’ and turn from that of ‘thorns.’