“Did I love him?  He was a nobleman and I a tradesman’s daughter.  No.  I did not love him.  I have lived to learn it.  And now I should hate him, if I did not despise him.”

“Can you be deceived in love?” said Richard, more to himself than to her.

“Yes.  When we’re young we can be very easily deceived.  If there is such a thing as love, we discover it after we have tossed about and roughed it.  Then we find the man, or the woman, that suits us:—­and then it’s too late! we can’t have him.”

“Singular!” murmured Richard, “she says just what my father said.”

He spoke aloud:  “I could forgive you if you had loved him.”

“Don’t be harsh, grave judge!  How is a girl to distinguish?”

“You had some affection for him?  He was the first?”

She chose to admit that.  “Yes.  And the first who talks of love to a girl must be a fool if he doesn’t blind her.”

“That makes what is called first love nonsense.”

“Isn’t it?”

He repelled the insinuation.  “Because I know it is not, Bella.”

Nevertheless she had opened a wider view of the world to him, and a colder.  He thought poorly of girls.  A woman a sensible, brave, beautiful woman seemed, on comparison, infinitely nobler than those weak creatures.

She was best in her character of lovely rebel accusing foul injustice.  “What am I to do?  You tell me to be different.  How can I?  What am I to do?  Will virtuous people let me earn my bread?  I could not get a housemaid’s place!  They wouldn’t have me—­I see their noses smelling!  Yes I can go to the hospital and sing behind a screen!  Do you expect me to bury myself alive?  Why, man, I have blood:  I can’t become a stone.  You say I am honest, and I will be.  Then let me till you that I have been used to luxuries, and I can’t do without them.  I might have married men—­lots would have had me.  But who marries one like me but a fool? and I could not marry a fool.  The man I marry I must respect.  He could not respect me—­I should know him to be a fools and I should be worse off than I am now.  As I am now, they may look as pious as they like—­I laugh at them!”

And so forth:  direr things.  Imputations upon wives:  horrible exultation at the universal peccancy of husbands.  This lovely outcast almost made him think she had the right on her side, so keenly her Parthian arrows pierced the holy centres of society, and exposed its rottenness.

Mrs. Mount’s house was discreetly conducted:  nothing ever occurred to shock him there.  The young man would ask himself where the difference was between her and the Women of society?  How base, too, was the army of banded hypocrites!  He was ready to declare war against them on her behalf.  His casus beli, accurately worded, would have read curiously.  Because the world refused to lure the lady to virtue with the offer of a housemaid’s place, our knight threw down his challenge.  But