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dangerous man; but then bad men are not bad women, and she let him
come
to her house to show she was not afraid--she took no account of Jessie.
When the elopement came, therefore, it was a double disappointment
to her, for she perceived his hand by a kind of instinct. She did the
correct thing. The correct thing, as you know, is to take hansom cabs,
regardless of expense, and weep and say you do not know WHAT to do,
round the circle of your confidential friends. She could not have ridden
nor wept more had Jessie been her own daughter--she showed the properest
spirit. And she not only showed it, but felt it.
Mrs. Milton, as a successful little authoress and still more successful
widow of thirty-two,--"Thomas Plantagenet is a charming woman,"
her reviewers used to write invariably, even if they spoke ill of
her,--found the steady growth of Jessie into womanhood an unmitigated
nuisance and had been willing enough to keep her in the background.
And Jessie--who had started this intercourse at fourteen with abstract
objections to stepmothers--had been active enough in resenting this.
Increasing rivalry and antagonism had sprung up between them, until
they could engender quite a vivid hatred from a dropped hairpin or
the cutting of a book with a sharpened knife. There is very little
deliberate wickedness in the world. The stupidity of our selfishness
gives much the same results indeed, but in the ethical laboratory it
shows a different nature. And when the disaster came, Mrs. Milton's
remorse for their gradual loss of sympathy and her share in the losing
of it, was genuine enough.
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