by that, and how much should I lose!'

Bella's expressive little eyebrows remonstrated with the fire for some
short time before she rejoined:

'Don't think that I press you, Lizzie; but wouldn't you gain in peace,
and hope, and even in freedom? Wouldn't it be better not to live a
secret life in hiding, and not to be shut out from your natural and
wholesome prospects? Forgive my asking you, would that be no gain?'

'Does a woman's heart that--that has that weakness in it which you have
spoken of,' returned Lizzie, 'seek to gain anything?'

The question was so directly at variance with Bella's views in life, as
set forth to her father, that she said internally, 'There, you little
mercenary wretch! Do you hear that? Ain't you ashamed of your self?'
and unclasped the girdle of her arms, expressly to give herself a
penitential poke in the side.

'But you said, Lizzie,' observed Bella, returning to her subject when
she had administered this chastisement, 'that you would lose, besides.
Would you mind telling me what you would lose, Lizzie?'

'I should lose some of the best recollections, best encouragements,
and best objects, that I carry through my daily life. I should lose my
belief that if I had been his equal, and he had loved me, I should have
tried with all my might to make him better and happier, as he would have
made me. I should lose almost all the value that I put upon the little
learning I have, which is all owing to him, and which I conquered the
difficulties of, that he might not think it thrown away upon me. I
should lose a kind of picture of him--or of what he might have been,
if I had been a lady, and he had loved me--which is always with me, and
which I somehow feel that I could not do a mean or a wrong thing before.
I should leave off prizing the remembrance that he has done me nothing
but good since I have known him, and that he has made a change within
me, like--like the change in the grain of these hands, which were
coarse, and cracked, and hard, and brown when I rowed on the river with
father, and are softened and made supple by this new work as you see
them now.'

They trembled, but with no weakness, as she showed them.

'Understand me, my dear;' thus she went on. I have never dreamed of
the possibility of his being anything to me on this earth but the
kind picture that I know I could not make you understand, if the
understanding was not in your own breast already. I have no more dreamed
of the