This gives the general idea of what went on at Ma Terpsichore’s, though it omits a particular of difference: the girls of 1867, not so squeamish as those of 1749, were willingly auctioned off in a final tableau.

However, Charles was not there to make a bid. The less obscene preambles he had quite enjoyed. He put on his much-traveled face, he had seen better things in Paris (or so he whispered to Sir Tom), he played the blase young know-all. But as the clothes fell, so did his drunkenness; he glanced at the lecherously parted mouths of the shadowed men beside him, he heard Sir Tom already indicating his pick to the bishop’s son. The white bodies embraced, contorted, mimicked; but it seemed to Charles that there was a despair behind the fixed suggestive smiles of the performers. One was a child who could only just have reached puberty; and there seemed in her assumption of demure innocence something genuinely virginal, still agonized, not fully hardened by her profession.

Yet as he was revolted, so was he sexually irritated. He loathed the public circumstance of this exhibition; but he was enough of an animal to be privately disturbed and excited. Some time before the end he rose and quietly left the room, as if it were to relieve himself. In the anteroom outside the little danseuse who had served the champagne sat by a table with the gentlemen’s cloaks and canes. An artificial smile creased her painted face as she rose. Charles stared a moment at her elaborately disordered ringlets, her bare arms and almost bare bosom. He seemed about to speak, but then changed his mind and brusquely gestured for his things. He threw a half sovereign on the table beside the girl and blundered out.

In the street at the alley’s end he found several expectant cabs waiting. He took the first, shouted up (such was the cautious Victorian convention) the name of a Kensington street near to the one where he lived, and then threw himself into the seat. He did not feel nobly decent; but as if he had swallowed an insult or funked a duel. His father had lived a life in which such evenings were a commonplace; that he could not stomach them proved he was unnatural. Where now was the traveled man of the world? Shrunk into a miserable coward. And Ernestina, his engagement vows? But to recall them was to be a prisoner waking from a dream that he was free and trying to stand, only to be jerked down by his chains back into the black reality of his cell.

The hansom threaded its way slowly down a narrow street. It was crowded with other hansoms and carriages, for this was still very much in the area of sin. Under each light, in every doorway, stood prostitutes. From the darkness Charles watched them. He felt himself boiling, intolerable. If there had been a sharp spike in front of him he would, echoing Sarah before the thorn tree, have run his hand through it, so strong was his feeling for maceration, punishment, some action that would lance his bile.

A quieter street. And they passed a gaslight under which stood a solitary girl. Perhaps because of the flagrant frequency of the women in the street they had left she seemed forlorn, too inexperienced to venture closer. Yet her profession was unmistakable. She wore a dingy pink cotton dress with imitation roses at the breast; a white shawl round her shoulders. A black hat in the new style, small and masculine, perched over a large netted chignon of auburn hair. She stared at the passing hansom; and something about the shade of the hair, the alert dark-shadowed eyes, the vaguely wistful stance, made Charles crane forward and keep her in view through the oval side-window as the hansom passed. He had an intolerable moment, then he seized his stick and knocked hard with it on the roof above him. The driver stopped at once. There were hurried footsteps; and then the face appeared, slightly below him, beside the open front of the hansom.

She was not really like Sarah. He saw the hair was too red to be natural; and there was a commonness about her, an artificial boldness in her steady eyes and red-lipped smile; too red, like a gash of blood. But just a tinge—something in the firm eyebrows, perhaps, or the mouth.

“You have a room?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell him where to go.”

She disappeared from his sight a moment and said something to the driver behind. Then she stepped up, making the hansom rock, and got in beside him, filling the narrow space with cheap perfume. He felt the light cloth of her sleeve and skirt brush him, but they did not touch. The hansom moved on. There was a silence for a hundred yards or more.

“Is it for all night, sir?”

“Yes.”

“I asks ‘cause I adds the price of the fare back if it ain’t.”

He nodded, and stared into the darkness ahead of him. They passed another clopping hundred yards in silence. He felt her relax a little, the smallest pressure against his arm.

“Terrible cold for the time of year.”

“Yes.” He glanced at her. “You must notice such things.”

“I don’t do no work when it snows. Some does. But I don’t.”

More silence. This time Charles spoke.

“You have been long… ?”

“Since I was eighteen, sir. Two years come May.”

“Ah.”

He stole another look at her during the next silence. A horrid mathematics gnawed at Charles’s mind: three hundred and sixty-five, say three hundred “working,” multiply by two… it was six hundred to one that she did not have some disease. Was there some delicate way he could ask? There was not. He glanced at her again in an advantageous moment of outside light. Her complexion seemed unblemished. But he was a fool; as regards syphilis he knew he would have been ten times safer at a luxury establishment like the one he had left. To pick up a mere Cockney streetwalker… but his fate was sealed. He wished it so. They were heading north, towards the Tottenham Court Road.

“Do you wish me to pay you now?”

“I ain’t partickler, sir. Just as you fancy.”

“Very well. How much?”

She hesitated. Then: “Normal, sir?”

He flashed a look at her; nodded.

“All night I usual charges…” and her tiny hesitation was pathetically dishonest, “… a sovereign.”

He felt inside his frock coat and passed her the coin.

“Thank you, sir.” She put it discreetly away in her reticule. And then she managed an oblique answer to his secret fear. “I only go with gentlemen, sir. You don’t need no worries like that.”

In his turn he said, “Thank you.”

The hansom drew up at a house in a narrow side street east of the Tottenham Court Road. Stepping quickly out of the vehicle, the girl went straight up some steps to a door and let herself in. The hansom driver was an old, old man, so long encased in his many-caped driving coat and his deep-banded top hat that it was hard to imagine they had not grown onto his body. Setting his whip in the stand beside his seat and taking his cutty out of his mouth, he held his grimed hand down, cupped, for the money. Meanwhile he stared straight ahead to the end of the dark street, as if he could not bear to set eyes on Charles again. Charles was glad not to be looked at; and yet felt quite as unspeakable as this ancient cab driver seemed determined to make him feel. He had a moment of doubt. He could spring back in, for the girl had disappeared… but then a black obstinacy made him pay.

Charles found the prostitute waiting in a poorly lit hallway, her back to him. She did not look round, but moved up the stairs as soon as she heard him close the door. There was a smell of cooking, obscure voices from the back of the house.