Sympathy and Recovery
The lady allows the narrator’s observation to be just in the main, but insists that, notwithstanding the disgraces which have fallen to her share, she has not been so unlucky in the condition of a prostitute as many others of the same community. She describes having often seen, while strolling the streets at midnight, naked wretches reduced to rags and filth huddled together like swine in the corner of a dark alley—some of whom, but eighteen months before, she had known as the favourites of the town, rolling in affluence and glittering in all the pomp of equipage and dress. Crying out “Miserable wretch that I am! perhaps the same horrors are decreed for me!” she pauses, then resolutely declares: “No! I shall never live to such extremity of distress; my own hand shall open a way for my deliverance, before I arrive at that forlorn period.” Her condition fills the narrator with sympathy and compassion; he reveres her qualifications, looks upon her as unfortunate rather than criminal, and tends her with such care and success that in less than two months her health—as well as his own—is perfectly re-established.
A Plan for a New Life
As the two often confer upon their mutual affairs and interchange advice, a thousand different projects are formed, only to appear impracticable upon further canvassing. They would gladly go to service, but who would take them in without recommendation? At length an expedient occurs to the lady, which she intends to lay hold of: with the first money she earns she will procure the homely garb of a country wench, travel to some village a good distance from town, and come up in a waggon as a fresh girl for service, by which means she may be provided for in a manner much more suitable to her inclination than her present way of life.
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