The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 305: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

CHAPTER XXIV THE FOUR SIRENS THE scene changes to the sumptuous establishment of Madame Angelique in London, and we must again introduce our readers to the apartment which communicated by means of the mirror-contrived door with the Frenchman’s house adjoining. In this room we shall find four beautiful girls, as on the first occasion when the reader was initiated in the mysteries of this temple of voluptuousness; but of these present four, two were new importations to the Frenchwoman’s house of fashionable infamy. Armantine, the French girl, was still there; Linda, the German girl, was likewise still an inmate of the same place; the other two have yet to be described. All four were exquisitely dressed in evening toilet; their charms were displayed, we can scarcely say to the utmost advantage, for this implies a consistency with that modesty without which beauty loses half its fascination, but those lovely contours of bust were exposed in a manner that left but little more to be revealed. And as if too by that which was originally a study, but which had now become a habit, the attitudes of those four girls were full of a voluptuous abandonment, so that if they had been sitting to an ar- tist who sought to depict four different personifications of luxurious sensuousness they could not possibly have chosen better positions, nor could better models have been selected. Yet there was nothing of the absolute grossness of the ordinary houses of infamy, nor of the manner of their inmates, discernible in that room nor on the part of those four young women. The furniture was all sumptuous, luxurious too, even to the carrying out of Oriental ideas of 274 ECORNIELIOO KS, (Ee)