FullReads

“That I should be very sorry to do; but I cannot ride with Mr. Sydney.”

“Cannot! and why?”

“How can you ask, mamma? How can you wish me to associate intimately with the sort of man he is?”

“What windmills are you fighting now, Augusta? For a sensible girl, you are the silliest I ever met with. What do you mean?”

“You surely know what I mean, mamma! You know that Russel Sydney has been one of the most dissipated men in the city.”

“So have forty other men been who are very good husbands now, or whose wives are too prudent to make a fuss about it if they are not. Really, Augusta, I do not think it very creditable to a young lady, to be seeking information of this sort about young men.”

“I have not sought it. I never dreamed,” Augusta looked steadfastly in her mother’s face, “that my mother would introduce a man to me who, as we both have heard, on good authority, has kept a mistress since he was eighteen, and changed her as often as suited his caprice; but having heard this, I surely will not disregard it.”

“You are absurdly scrupulous and very unjust, my dear. Sydney has entirely given up all this sort of thing—he assured me he had.”

“And you relyingly took his assurance, mamma, and would not listen, for one moment, to that poor penitent girl’s assurance.”

“Oh that’s quite a different thing;”

“I see no difference, excepting that the one is the strong party, the other the weak,—the one the betrayer, the other the betrayed. The fact of the girl seeking honest employment is prima facie evidence in favour of her truth.”

“You talk so absurdly, Augusta! And, to speak plainly, I do not think it over delicate,” continued Mrs. Emly, with a pharisaical curl of her lip, “for an unmarried lady of nineteen to be discussing subjects of this nature—though it may be quite often your Aunt Emily’s fashion to do so.”

“It is very much my Aunt Emily’s fashion to strip off the husk, and look for the kernel—to throw away the world’s current counterfeit, and keep the real gold. Probably she would think it far more indelicate to receive a notoriously licentious man into her society, than to express her opinion of his vices: and I know she thinks it not only indelicate, but irrational and unchristian, to tolerate certain vices in men, for which women are proscribed and hunted down.”

“Mercy on us, what an oration for nothing! Truly, you and your Aunt Emily, with your country-evening morals, are very competent judges of town society. It seems to my poor common-sense perceptions, that you are rather a partial distributor of your charities. You are quite willing to receive this equivocal young woman, with her confessedly illegitimate child, and you would doubly bar and bolt the door against a very charming young man, who has sown his wild oats.”

“Oh, surely mamma, this is not the true state of the case. The one party is a man of fashion, received and current, the other a poor young outcast, who seems more sinned against than sinning—probably the victim of some such ‘charming’ young man as Sydney. As women, as professed followers of Christ, my dear mother, ought we not to help her out of the pit into which she has fallen? May we not guard her from future danger and misery?”

Mrs. Emly stood for a moment silent and rebuked before the gentle earnestness of her daughter; but after a moment, she rallied and said with a forced laugh,—”You had best join the Magdalen Society at once, Augusta; they will give you plenty of this fancy-missionary work to do; I confess it is not quite to my taste.”