MY SECRET LIFE
and whom I forgot to say tried to get hold of Charlotte, I saw with the dressmaker’s daughter. Said he, talking to me next day, “She is jolly ugly, but she’s good enough for a feel, I felt her cunt last night, and think she has been fucked (he thought that of every girl), her mother’s a rum old gal too, she will let you meet a girl at her cottage, not whores, you know, but if they are respectable.” “Is it a baudy house?” I asked. “Oh no, it’s quite respectable, but if you walk in with a lady, she leaves you in the room together, and when you come out, if you just give her half a crown, she drops a curtesy, just as she does when she opens the pew-doors and anyone gives her six pence, but she is quite respectable—the clergyman goes to see her sometimes.
Charlotte asked to go out to a dressmaker, I met her as if by chance at the door, the old pew-opener asked if I would like to walk in and wait. I did. Charlotte came in after she had arranged about her dress. There was a sofa in the room, and she was soon on it; we left together, I have two or three shillings (money went much further then), and the pew-opener said, “You can always wait here when your young lady comes to see my daughter.”
When we went a second time, she asked me if I went to St. Mary’s Chapel (her Chapel). We went to her house in the day that time. When going away she said, “Perhaps you wont mind always going out first, for neighbours are so ill-natured.” The old woman was really a pew-opener, her daughter really a dressmaker, but she was glad to earn a few shillings, by letting her house be used for assignations of a quiet sort; she would not have let gay women in, from what I heard.
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