r was not so ignorant as some girls; she had for some time had one
at her side capable of casting not a little light of the kind that is
darkness.

"_Duty_, mamma!" she cried, her eyes flaming, and her cheek flushed
with the shame of the thing that was but as yet the merest object in
her thought; "can a woman be born for such things? How _could_
I--mamma, how could any woman, with an atom of self-respect, consent to
occupy the same--_room_ with Mr. Redmain?"

"Hesper! I am shocked. _Where_ did you learn to speak, not to say
_think_, of such things? Have I taken such pains--good God! you strike
me dumb! Have I watched my child like a very--angel, as anxious to keep
her mind pure as her body fair, and is _this_ the result?" Upon what
Lady Margaret founded her claim to a result more satisfactory to her
maternal designs, it were hard to say. For one thing, she had known
nothing of what went on in her nursery, positively nothing of the real
character of the women to whom she gave the charge of it;
and--although, I dare say, for worldly women, Hesper's schoolmistresses
were quite respectable--what did her mother, what could she know of the
governesses or of the flock of sheep--all presumably, but how certainly
_all_ white?--into which she had sent her?

"Is _this_ the result?" said Lady Margaret.

"Was it your object, then, to keep me innocent, only that I might have
the necessary lessons in wickedness first from my husband?" said
Hesper, with a rudeness for which, if an apology be necessary, I leave
my reader to find it.

"Hesper, you are vulgar!" said Lady Margaret, with cold indignation,
and an expression of unfeigned disgust. She was, indeed, genuinely
shocked. That a young lady of Hesper's birth and position should talk
like this, actually objecting to a man as her husband because she
recoiled from his wickedness, of which she was not to be supposed to
know, or to be capable of understanding, anything, was a thing unheard
of in her world-a thing unmaidenly in the extreme! What innocent girl
would or could or dared allude to such matters? She had no right to
know an atom about them!

"You are a married woman, mamma," returned Hesper, "and therefore must
know a great many things I neither know nor wish to know. For anything
I know, you may be ever so much a better woman than I, for having
learned not to mind things that are a horror to me. But there was a
time when you shrunk from them as I do now. I appeal to you a