"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 as a woman: for God's sake, save me from marrying
that wretch!"
She spoke in a tone inconsistently calm.
"Girl! is it possible you dare to call the man, whom your father
and I have chosen for your husband, a wretch!"
"Is he not a wretch, mamma?"
"If he were, how should I know it? What has any lady got to do
with a man's secrets?"
"Not if he wants to marry her daughter?"
"Certainly not.
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