If there have been opportunities to meet decent women of good social
standing, he has always thrown them aside with the declaration that
they bore him to death, and there never had entered into his heart a
feeling or idea of real affection until he met LAURA. He fell for a
moment under the spell of her fascination, and then, with cold logic,
he analyzed her, and found out that, while outwardly she had
every sign of girlhood,--ingenuousness, sweetness of character and
possibility of affection,--spiritually and mentally she was nothing
more than a moral wreck. He observed keenly her efforts to win him and
her disappointment at her failure--not that she cared so much for him
personally, but that it hurt her vanity not to be successful with
this good-for-nothing, good-natured vagabond, when men of wealth and
position she made kneel at her feet. He observed her slowly-changing
point of view: how from a kittenish ingenuousness she became serious,
womanly, really sincere. He knew that he had awakened in her her first
decent affection, and he knew that she was awakening in him his first
desire to do things and be big and worth while. So together these
two began to drift toward a path of decent dealing, decent ambition,
decent thought, and decent love, until at last they both find
themselves, and acknowledge all the wickedness of what had been, and
plan for all the virtue and goodness of what is to be. It is at this
point that our first act begins.

ELFIE ST. CLAIR is a type of a Tenderloin grafter in New York, who,
after all, has been more sinned against than sinning; who, having been
imposed upon, deceived, ill-treated and bulldozed by the type of men
who prey on women in New York, has turned the tables, and with her
charm and her beauty has gone out to make the same slaughter of the
other sex as she suffered with many of her sisters.