ere 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 been
my late childhood? I had none before. Do not tell me that I had, tonight
of all nights in my life!'

'You might have been well married,' said her mother, 'twenty times at
least, Edith, if you had given encouragement enough.'

'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
makes the 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.

'You talk strangely to-night, Edith, to your own Mother.'

'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 mad