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Page:Theodore Alfred Bingham - The Girl That Disappears (1911).djvu/52

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THE GIRL THAT DISAPPEARS

For in the thirty thousand—these figures are not exaggeration, they are too conservative if anything—women engaged in the social evil in New York City there are many classes of women. There are some who live in the most magnificent luxury, whose incomes run far into the thousands. They, in most cases, are not the sort of women one generally puts under the heading of prostitutes. They have developed the business to a science and have a select and limited clientele. These women are held up to the girl who toils as glowing examples of success in life, but to the police eye they are one of the biggest factors in the social evil. They never place themselves in a position where arrest would be even remotely possible, and often are accounted persons of eminent respectability by their immediate neighbors.

Another level in the social scale of the half-world is occupied by the chorus girl, who had come to be an indispensable figure in the

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