But the truth is, that at no time of my life have I been a person to hold
myself polluted by the touch or approach of any creature that wore a
human shape; on the contrary, from my very earliest youth it has been my
pride to converse familiarly, _more Socratio_, with all human beings,
man, woman, and child, that chance might fling in my way; a practice
which is friendly to the knowledge of human nature, to good feelings, and
to that frankness of address which becomes a man who would be thought a
philosopher. For a philosopher should not see with the eyes of the poor
limitary creature calling himself a man of the world, and filled with
narrow and self-regarding prejudices of birth and education, but should
look upon himself as a catholic creature, and as standing in equal
relation to high and low, to educated and uneducated, to the guilty and
the innocent. Being myself at that time of necessity a peripatetic, or a
walker of the streets, I naturally fell in more frequently with those
female peripatetics who are technically called street-walkers. Many of
these women had occasionally taken my part against watchmen who wished to
drive me off the steps of houses where I was sitting. But one amongst
them, the one on whose account I have at all introduced this subject--yet
no! let me not class the, oh! noble-minded Ann--with that order of women.
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