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ion as the heroine of her father's book. Like the girl Ione, in "The Unexplored," she had lived in a charmed seclusion, far from the roar of modern civilization, far from the great cities which are the abomination of desolation in our time. Knowledge had come to her filtered through the minds of those who closed their eyes to evil and their ears to tales of sin. She did not know how the poor lived: she had only the vaguest and haziest possible notions concerning misery and want and disease. She was not only pure and innocent, but she was ignorant. She had scarcely ever seen a newspaper. She had read very few novels. She had lived almost all her life with women, and she had imbibed the notion that her marriage was a matter which her mother would arrange without particularly consulting her (Lesley's) inclinations. To a girl brought up in this way there was much to shock and repel in Caspar Brooke's romance. More than once, indeed, she put it down indignantly: more than once she cried out, in the silence of her room, "Oh, but it can't be true!" Nevertheless, she knew in her heart of hearts that the strong and burning words which she was reading could not have been written were they not sincerely felt. And as for facts, she could easily put them to the test. She could ask other people to tell her whether they were true. Were there really so many criminals in London; so many people "without visible means of subsistence?" so many children going out in a morning to their Board Schools without breakfast? But surely something ought to be done! How could people sit down and allow these things to be? How could her father himself, who wrote about such things, live in comfort, even (compared with the wretchedly poor) in modest luxury, without lifting a finger to help them? But there Lesley caught herself up. What had Mr. Kenyon said? Had he not spoken of the things that Caspar Brooke had done? For almost the first time Lesley began to wonder what made her father so busy. She had never heard a word concerning the pursuits that Mr. Kenyon had mentioned as so engrossing. "The splendid work at Macclesfield Buildings:" what was that? The people whom he had helped: what people? Whom could she ask? Not her father himself--that was out of the question. He never spoke to her except on trivial subjects. She remembered with a sudden and painful flash of insight, that conversations between him and his sister were sometimes broken off when s
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