CHAPTER XXXII.

THE PRETTY BOY.

There is a section of the young men in the city who may well be included in the ranks of the vicious classes. A deal of their miserable little histories is made during the hours of the night. These are the young men who live and fatten on their families. One may have some admiration for the brute courage of a man who takes the risk of death for the sake of ill-gotten gains of any kind. But what respect can we have for the thing that escapes labor by sticking like a barnacle to the hardly-earned comforts of a home on the strength of an affection that is all one-sided—that takes everything and gives nothing. But there is a class of young men in the city who do this. Fellows whom you see hanging about in the daytime, doing anything else but making an honest living, and whom you will find at night in improper places at all hours. One has no patience in writing about these fellows. They are the sons of men who have to work hard to make a livelihood, but in this latter particular the sons take good care not to imitate their sires. Probably every other member of the family contributes to the support of the decencies and comforts of the home except this drone, who is his mother’s darling, and who is

TOO PRETTY TO BE SPOILED

on any mechanical work, and has not brains enough to do anything else. He sees his sisters go out every morning to earn a pittance which they ungrudgingly throw into the general funds at the close of each week, to the end that this loafer may be clothed in tight pants, a diagonal jacket and a fawn-colored overcoat, wherewith he may stand at a corner at nights and insult other men’s sisters. One has no patience writing of this jackanapes. He is not generally a hard drinker. If he were to get drunk he would disarrange the sweet little love-locks that are oiled down over his retreating forehead. His greatest ambition is to make a mash on some indecent woman whose worst crime is her bad taste in bestowing caresses on such a creature. If her affection is of sufficient intensity to stand his bleeding her of her filthy gains, his joy is complete. The first use he makes of his beauty-money is to hire a furnished room in a public building where he plays the spider while silly young girls play the flies.

It is really extraordinary the length of time it takes for this thing to exhaust the affection of his family. The old man generally kicks pretty early in the game, but the barnacle simply ignores anything short of the old man’s cowhide boots. His effrontery is amazing. Shame is a feeling unknown to him. He is a pretty boy, and it is the duty of all his relatives to preserve him in his pristine loveliness. He does not live in his home. He simply uses it. It is the

ONLY PURE PLACE HE ENTERS

and it is therefore uncongenial to him. All services rendered to him he takes as a matter of course, and as the natural homage which these inferior creatures, his mother and sisters (mere women) should pay to their handsome relative. He has no belief in the general purity of woman, but hears it impugned by the scurvy canaille with whom he associates without a chivalric blush for the gentle women at home to whom his swinish passions would not be understood. He is too much of a coward to commit crime and take chances of the penitentiary. When the day comes that his indignant father will stand him no longer, and kicks him out of doors, the choice of working, stealing, or starving is presented to him. He may steal now, often with a view to revenging himself on the people who have stood his disgraceful idleness so long. He will do anything that is dirty, or mean, or unprincipled rather than work, and the eternal justice is served when the penitentiary that fairly yearns for him scoops him in.

The only thing that he is regular in is his meals, and he doesn’t come to them when he can get any outsider to pay for one for him.

HE TAKES IN EVERYTHING.

He may be found at horse-races, in billiard-rooms, at cock-fights, at street corners, at hotel doors—and everywhere he is in the way. He has seldom any money in his pocket, and as he must have good clothes, he spends a deal of his time endeavoring to discover tailors who don’t know him, and who put trust in his nickel-plated promises.

This is the most pronounced type of the genus well-dressed loafer, but there are grades. Some work a little, others work a good deal—all spend everything they make on themselves, and exist at the expense of hard-working fathers, mothers, or sisters.