Churches, whorehouses and a new girl

The narrator sets out how a new country fills up — openers first, then lawyers, then culture — and argues that the church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West together and did much the same work. He walks the reader down Salinas's Row and introduces its madams: Fartin' Jenny, keeper of secrets, and the Nigger of the Long Green, who ran her house "like a cathedral dedicated to a sad but erect Priapus". Faye, up from Sacramento, is a third phase — motherly, moral, easily shocked. The new girl calling herself Kate puzzles her: too young, too well spoken, and plainly not learning the trade. Kate makes herself indispensable, nursing the other girls, lending money, cutting the grocery and laundry bills, until Faye thinks of her as a daughter and wishes she were not a whore. Kate remembers her interview with the sheriff, who refused to hear her lie about being sorry and asked only that she keep her new name, dye her hair, and put her invented past two thousand miles from King City.

The essay on churches and brothels licenses the chapter to treat the Row as ordinary civic life, which is why the sheriff's terms sound like zoning rather than justice. Kate's technique changes register with the company: sentiment for Faye, plain truth for the one man who has already priced her. The kiss she wipes off in the hallway does the rest.