Dickens' Women Read Free Page B

from a child –’
    â€˜A child!’ said Edith, looking at her, ‘when was I a child? What childhood did you ever leave to me? I was a woman – artful, designing, mercenary, laying snares for men – before I knew myself, or you, or even understood the base and wretched aim of every new display I learnt. You gave birth to a woman. Look upon her. She is in her pride to-night.’
    And as she spoke, she struck her hand upon her beautiful bosom, as though she would have beaten down herself.
    â€˜Look at me,’ she said, ‘who have never known what it is to have an honest heart, and love. Look at me, taught to scheme and plot when children play; and married in my youth – an old age of design – to one for whom I had no feeling but indifference. Look at me, whom he left a widow, dying before his inheritance descended to him – ajudgment on you! well deserved! – and tell me what has been my life for ten years since.’
    â€˜We have been making every effort to endeavour to secure to you a good establishment,’ rejoined her mother. ‘That has been your life. And now you have got it.’
    â€˜There is no slave in a market; there is no horse in a fair: so shown and offered and examined and paraded, mother, as I have been, for ten shameful years,’ cried Edith, with a burning brow, and the same bitter emphasis on the one word. ‘Is it not so? Have I been made the bye-word of all kinds of men? Have fools, have profligates, have boys, have dotards, dangled after me, and one by one rejected me, and fallen off, because you were too plain with all your cunning: yes, and too true, with all those false pretences: until we have almost come to be notorious? The licence of look and touch,’ she said, with flashing eyes, ‘have I submitted to it, in half the places of resort upon the map of England. Have I been hawked and vended here and there until the last grain of self-respect is dead within me, and I loathe myself? Has this been my late childhood? I had none before. Do not tell me that I had, to-night, of all nights in my life!’
    â€˜You might have been well married,’ said her mother, ‘twenty times at least, Edith, if you had given encouragement enough.’
    â€˜No! Who takes me, refuse that I am, and as I well deserve to be,’ she answered, raising her head, and trembling in her energy of shame and stormy pride, ‘shall take me, as this man does, with no art of mine put forth to lure him. He sees me at the auction, and he thinks it well to buy me. Let him! When he came to view me – perhaps to bid – he required to see the roll of my accomplishments. I gave it to him. When he would have me show one of them, to justify his purchase to his men, I require of him to say which he demands, and I exhibit it. I will do no more. He makesthe purchase of his own will, and with his own sense of its worth, and the power of his money; and I hope it may never disappoint him. I have not vaunted and pressed the bargain; neither have you, so far as I have been able to prevent you.’
    â€˜You talk strangely to-night, Edith, to your own mother.’
    â€˜It seems so to me; stranger to me than you,’ said Edith. ‘But my education was completed long ago. I am too old now, and have fallen too low, by degrees, to take a new course, and to stop yours, and to help myself. The germ of all that purifies a woman’s breast, and makes it true and good, has never stirred in mine, and I have nothing else to sustain me when I despise myself.’ There had been a touching sadness in her voice, but it was gone, when she went on to say, with a curled lip, ‘So, as we are genteel and poor, I am content that we should be made rich by these means; all I say is, I have kept the only purpose I have had the strength to form – I had almost said the power, with you at my side, mother – and have not tempted this man