feel keenly, and I hoped he did.

More than that. He was tame in comparison with Mr Gowan, who knew how
to address me on equal terms, and how to anatomise the wretched people
around us.

This went on, until the aunt, my Mistress, took it upon herself to speak
to me. It was scarcely worth alluding to; she knew I meant nothing; but
she suggested from herself, knowing it was only necessary to suggest,
that it might be better if I were a little less companionable with Mr
Gowan.

I asked her how she could answer for what I meant? She could always
answer, she replied, for my meaning nothing wrong. I thanked her,
but said I would prefer to answer for myself and to myself. Her other
servants would probably be grateful for good characters, but I wanted
none.

Other conversation followed, and induced me to ask her how she knew that
it was only necessary for her to make a suggestion to me, to have it
obeyed? Did she presume on my birth, or on my hire? I was not bought,
body and soul. She seemed to think that her distinguished nephew had
gone into a slave-market and purchased a wife.

It would probably have come, sooner or later, to the end to which it did
come, but she brought it to its issue at once. She told me, with assumed
commiseration, that I had an unhappy temper. On this repetition of the
old wicked injury, I withheld no longer, but exposed to her all I had
known of her and seen in her, and all I had undergone within myself
since I had occupied the despicable position of being engaged to her
nephew. I told her that Mr Gowan was the only relief I had had in my
degradation; that I had borne it too long, and that I shook it off too
late; but that I would see none of them more. And I never did. Your dear
friend followed me to my retreat, and was very droll on the severance of
the connection; though he was sorry, too, for the excellent people
(in their way the best he had ever met), and deplored the necessity of
breaking mere house-flies on the wheel. He protested before long, and
far more truly than I then supposed, that he was not worth acceptance
by a woman of such endowments, and such power of character; but--well,
well--!

Your dear friend amused me and amused himself as long as it suited
his inclinations; and then reminded me that we were both people of the
world, that we both understood mankind, that we both knew there was no
such thing as romance, that we were both prepared for going different
ways to seek our f