Quotation

there was no trade like a Miss's. It required no training, capital, nor premises, and the supply of customers would never run out till the end of the world. 'I defy you,' she would slur, 'I defy you to name me any other trade so merry.' === Not every girl had to end up a servant or a seamstress. There were cooks and milkmongers, fishwives and flower hawkers, washerwomen and gardeners and midwives and even the odd apothecary. Women kept schools and asylums, pie stalls and millinery shops. Mary made herself ask questions of strangers, everywhere she went. All she needed to know was, how could a girl of fourteen make her own way in the world? === 'But it doesn't even button up.' 'It's not meant to, dolt. It's a slammerkin.' === 'Slovenly, slatternly sluts and slipshod, sleezy slammerkins that we are!' === It was the way the world was. It was the bargain most women made, whether wife or whore, one side of the sheets or another.