is implied in the term ‘immorality.’  Out of courtesy to you, they may assent to what you say, but they do not comprehend your meaning when you talk of virtue or purity; you are simply talking over their heads” (Merrick, op. cit., p. 28).  The same attitude may be found among prostitutes everywhere.  In Italy Ferriani mentions a girl of fifteen who, when accused of indecency with a man in a public garden, denied with tears and much indignation.  He finally induced her to confess, and then asked her:  “Why did you try to make me believe you were a good girl?” She hesitated, smiled, and said:  “Because they say girls ought not to do what I do, but ought to work.  But I am what I am, and it is no concern of theirs.”  This attitude is often more than an instinctive feeling; in intelligent prostitutes it frequently becomes a reasoned conviction.  “I can bear everything, if so it must be,” wrote the author of the Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (p. 291), “even serious and honorable contempt, but I cannot bear scorn.  Contempt—­yes, if it is justified.  If a poor and pretty girl with sick and bitter heart stands alone in life, cast off, with temptations and seductions offering on every side, and, in spite of that, out of inner conviction she chooses the grey and monotonous path of renunciation and middle-class morality, I recognize in that girl a personality, who has a certain justification in looking down with contemptuous pity on weaker girls.  But those geese who, under the eyes of their shepherds and life-long owners, have always been pastured in smooth green fields, have certainly no right to laugh scornfully at others who have not been so fortunate.”  Nor must it be supposed that there is necessarily any sophistry in the prostitute’s justification of herself.  Some of our best thinkers and observers have reached a conclusion that is not dissimilar.  “The actual conditions of society are opposed to any high moral feeling in women,” Marro observes (La Puberta, p. 462), “for between those who sell themselves to prostitution and those who sell themselves to marriage, the only difference is in price and duration of the contract.”

We have already seen how very large a part in prostitution is furnished by those who have left domestic service to adopt this life (ante p. 264).  It is not difficult to find in this fact evidence of the kind of impulse which impels a woman to adopt the career of prostitution.  “The servant, in our society of equality,” wrote Goncourt, recalling somewhat earlier days when she was often admitted to a place in the family life, “has become nothing but a paid pariah, a machine for doing household work, and is no longer allowed to share the employer’s human life."[205] And in England, even half a century ago, we already find the same statements concerning the servant’s position:  “domestic service is a complete slavery,” with early hours and late hours, and constant running up and down stairs till her legs are swollen; “an amount of ingenuity