Mary Marston. George MacDonald

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 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. If he should not be altogether what he ought to be—and which of us is?—then you will have the honor of reclaiming him. But men settle down when they marry."

      "And what comes of their wives?"

      "What comes of women. You have your mother before you, Hesper."

      "O mother!" cried Hesper, now at length losing the horrible affectation of calm which she had been taught to regard as de rigueur , "is it possible that you, so beautiful, so dignified, would send me on to meet things you dare not tell me—knowing they would turn me sick or mad? How dares a man like that even desire in his heart to touch an innocent girl?"