you have kept a good
account, and that it's pretty accurate. Come, Edith. To your husband,
poor wretch, this was well enough--'

'Why, if,' she said, surveying him with a haughty contempt and disgust,
that he shrunk under, let him brave it as he would, 'if all my other
reasons for despising him could have been blown away like feathers,
his having you for his counsellor and favourite, would have almost been
enough to hold their place.'

'Is that a reason why you have run away with me?' he asked her,
tauntingly.

'Yes, and why we are face to face for the last time. Wretch! We meet
tonight, and part tonight. For not one moment after I have ceased to
speak, will I stay here!'

He turned upon her with his ugliest look, and gripped the table with his
hand; but neither rose, nor otherwise answered or threatened her.

'I am a woman,' she said, confronting him steadfastly, 'who from her
childhood has been shamed and steeled. I have been offered and rejected,
put up and appraised, until my very soul has sickened. I have not had
an accomplishment or grace that might have been a resource to me, but it
has been paraded and vended to enhance my value, as if the common crier
had called it through the streets. My poor, proud friends, have looked
on and approved; and every tie between us has been deadened in my
breast. There is not one of them for whom I care, as I could care for
a pet dog. I stand alone in the world, remembering well what a hollow
world it has been to me, and what a hollow part of it I have been
myself. You know this, and you know that my fame with it is worthless to
me.'

'Yes; I imagined that,' he said.

'And calculated on it,' she rejoined, 'and so pursued me. Grown too
indifferent for any opposition but indifference, to the daily working
of the hands that had moulded me to this; and knowing that my marriage
would at least prevent their hawking of me up and down; I suffered
myself to be sold, as infamously as any woman with a halter round her
neck is sold in any market-place. You know that.'

'Yes,' he said, showing all his teeth 'I know that.'

'And calculated on it,' she rejoined once more, 'and so pursued me.
From my marriage day, I found myself exposed to such new shame--to such
solicitation and pursuit (expressed as clearly as if it had been written
in the coarsest words, and thrust into my hand at every turn) from one
mean villain, that I felt as if I had never known humiliation till
that time. Th