"I don't know what I've said to you, my own: I don't know what I'm
saying or what the turn you've given my life has rendered me, heaven
forgive me, capable of saying. Have I lost all delicacy, all decency,
all measure of how far and how bad? It seems to me mostly that I have,
though I'm the last of whom you would ever have thought it. I've just
done it for YOU, precious--not to lose you, which would have been worst
of all: so that I've had to pay with my own innocence, if you do laugh!
for clinging to you and keeping you. Don't let me pay for nothing; don't
let me have been thrust for nothing into such horrors and such shames. I
never knew anything about them and I never wanted to know! Now I know
too much, too much!" the poor woman lamented and groaned. "I know so
much that with hearing such talk I ask myself where I am; and with
uttering it too, which is worse, say to myself that I'm far, too far,
from where I started! I ask myself what I should have thought with my
lost one if I had heard myself cross the line. There are lines I've
crossed with YOU where I should have fancied I had come to a pretty
pass--" She gasped at the mere supposition. "I've gone from one thing to
another, and all for the real love of you; and now what would any one
say--I mean any one but THEM--if they were to hear the way I go on? I've
had to keep up with you, haven't I?--and therefore what could I do less
than look to you to keep up with ME? But it's not THEM that are the
worst--by which I mean to say it's not HIM: it's your dreadfully base
papa and the one person in the world whom he could have found, I do
believe--and she's not the Countess, duck--wickeder than himself.
Pages:
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275