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.