around and around
her mind, timorous, but helpless, and without a hole of escape.

She would cease to be a maid within the circuit of the clock, or forsake
her family, and drive that great bloodhound of duty over the threshold
of her ruined home.

In the one case lay outward devastation--the red eyes of parents and
servants who had not slept all night, and looked at her as their
obdurate hostage, and the prying constables lodged upon the premises to
see that nothing was smuggled out, the ring of the auctioneer's bell,
and the fingering of boors and old gossips over the cherished things of
the family, even to her heirlooms, jewelry, and hosiery; the vast old
house a hollow barn when these were done, and she and her mother
visitors at the jail where her poor father looked through the bars, and
bent his head in shame!

Then the servants, one after another, mounted upon the court-house
block, the old gray servitors mocked, the little children parted, like
calves by the butcher, and the young girls feeling the desperate
apprehensions of abuse and violation, that were the other alternative to
herself, with whom purity was like the whiteness of the lily, prized
more than its beauty of form or its perfume.

She glanced in her mirror by the light that flamed in her brazen grate,
and saw the blushes climb like flying virgins at the sack of towns, up
the white ramparts of her neck and temples.

The form which had altered so little from childhood, supple and
straight, and moulded to perfection, was to fall like the young
hickory-tree in the August hurricane, twisted from its native grove. The
breath of the man she was to yield her life to, irresistible and hot as
that storm, she had felt already, when he held her for a moment in his
arms in the transport of passion, and heard his fearless avowal of
desire.

To marry any man now seemed hard; to marry this one was inexpressible
shame, and at the thought of it she could not shed a tear, such
paralysis came over her. She had read of the recent Greek revolution,
where elegant ladies of Scio, and other isles of the AEgean Sea, educated
in the best seminaries of Europe, had been sold by thousands as common
slaves in the markets of Constantinople, and carried to their estates by
brutal Turks, with all the gloating anticipation of lust and tyranny.

On this vivid episode started a procession of all the ages of women who
had been the sport of conquest since their common mother, Eve,