Deep In Sin.
At the entrance to the Rue de Trois Portes, the writer made a sudden move. “Here’s a poor, ragged woman lying stretched out on the sidewalk. She looks as if she might be dead.”
“Dead drunk,” responded the Chief of Detectives, cynically. “Even animal life seems suspended. Do you detect a very loathsome smell? It is a combination of all the drinks and perfumes popular among women of her kind. She is still young—hardly thirty years old.” Between her thick lips gleamed fine white teeth. She must have been pretty at one time.
“How disgusting she looks, all plastered over with mud.”
“She is what they call a ‘sidewalker.’”
“What’s that?”
“It is the slang name for a class of prostitutes whose only home is the scaffolding round some old house that is being pulled down, or some new one that is being built. They carry on their trade in the open air under bridges, in the trenches of the fortifications, in back alleys, where there are no janitors. Once a week, regularly, this one fetches up in the station-house. She comes lawfully by her drunkenness. Her mother died in hospital of delirium tremens. Her father committed suicide while drunk. She herself has almost got to the end of her rope. Some day, coming out of a pot-house, she’ll drop dead in the street, and then she’ll be on show, for the last time, at the Morgue. Although known to thousands, nobody will claim her body, and she will be turned over to the medical school for dissection.”
“What was her parents’ business?”
“Her mother’s trade could not be classified. Her father was a perambulating ‘fence,’ who used to peddle stolen goods from door to door.”