And terrible and vile as were the sources from which the fortunes had been derived, they were no viler nor more terrible than the purposes for which they had been spent.  Mrs. Vivie Patton had hinted to Montague of a “Decameron Club,” whose members gathered in each others’ homes and vied in the telling of obscene stories; Strathcona had told him about another set of exquisite ladies and gentlemen who gave elaborate entertainments, in which they dressed in the costumes of bygone periods, and imitated famous characters in history, and the vices and orgies of courts and camps.  One heard of “Cleopatra nights” on board of yachts at Newport.  There was a certain Wall Street “plunger,” who had begun life as a mining man in the West; and when his customers came in town, he would hire a trolley-car, and take a load of champagne and half a dozen prostitutes, and spend the night careering about the country.  This man was now quartered in one of the great hotels in New York; and in his apartments he would have prize fights and chicken fights; and bloodthirsty exhibitions called “purring matches,” in which men tried to bark each other’s shins; or perhaps a “battle royal,” with a diamond scarf-pin dangling from the ceiling, and half a dozen negroes in a free-for-all fight for the prize.

No picture of the ways of the Metropolis would be complete which did not force upon the reluctant reader some realization of the extent to which new and hideous incitements to vice were spreading.  To say that among the leisured classes such practices were raging like a pestilence would be no exaggeration.  Ten years ago they were regarded with aversion by even the professionally vicious; but now the commonest prostitute accepted them as part of her fate.  And there was no height to which they had not reached—­ministers of state were enslaved by them; great fortunes and public events were controlled by them.  In Washington there had been an ambassador whose natural daughter taught them in the houses of the great, until the scandal forced the minister’s recall.  Some of these practices were terrible in their effects, completely wrecking the victim in a short time; and physicians who studied their symptoms would be horrified to see them appearing in the homes of their friends.

And from New York, the centre of the wealth and culture of the country, these vices spread to every corner of it.  Theatrical companies and travelling salesmen carried them; visiting merchants and sightseers acquired them.  Pack-pedlers sold vile pictures and books—­the manufacturing or importing of which was now quite an industry; one might read catalogues printed abroad in English, the contents of which would make one’s flesh creep.  There were cheap weeklies, costing ten cents a year, which were thrust into area-windows for servant-girls; there were yellow-covered French novels of unbelievable depravity for the mistress of the house.  It was a curious commentary upon the morals of Society that upon the trains running to a certain suburban community frequented by the ultra-fashionable, the newsboys did a thriving business in such literature; and when the pastor of the fashionable church eloped with a Society girl, the bishop publicly laid the blame to the morals of his parishioners!