“Wife or mistress, it’s all the same,” he’d told his friends often enough. “Once you let a lady—virtuous or not—fasten upon you, you become the owner of a piece of troublesome property, where the tenants are forever in revolt and into which you are endlessly pouring money and labor. All for the occasional privilege—at her whim—of getting what you could get from any streetwalker for a few shillings.”
