The Pride of Eve by Warwick Deeping

The affair of Hugh Massinger, and Miss Champion's attitude towards it, provided Eve with an experience that threw a glare of new light upon the life of a woman who sets out to earn her own living. She had no need to go to the dramatists to be instructed, for she had touched the problem with her own hands, and discovered the sexual hypocrisy that Kate Duveen had always railed at. Here was she, lonely and struggling on the edge of life, and a man of Hugh Massinger's reputation and intelligence could do nothing more honourable to help her than to suggest the advantages of a sentimental seduction. Miss Champion, the woman, had failed to take the woman's part. Her middle-class cowardice was all for hushing things up, for accusing the insulted girl of indiscretions, for reproaching her with not failing to be a temptation to men. No smoke without some fire. It was safer to discharge such a young woman than to defend her. And Miss Champion's nostrils were very shy and sensitive. She was an automatic machine that reacted to any copper coin that could be called a convention. Certain things never ought to happen, and if they happened they never ought to be mentioned.

This affair inaugurated hard times for Eve, nor did the bitterness that it aroused in her help her to bear the new life with philosophy. It had had something of the effect on her that the first discovery of sex has upon a sensitive child. She felt disgusted, shocked, saddened. Life would never be quite the same, at least, so she told herself, for this double treachery had shaken her trust, and she wondered whether all men were like Hugh Massinger, and all women careful hypocrites like Miss Champion.