other, but hers were too cold and clear
to quail before them, let them flash and burn as they pleased.

"As you did papa?" said Hesper.

"As I did Mr. Mortimer."

"That explains a good deal, mamma."

"We are _your_ parents, anyhow, Hesper."

"I suppose so. I don't know which to be sorrier for--you or me. Tell
me, mamma: would _you_ marry Mr. Redmain?"

"That is a foolish question, and ought not to be put. It is one which,
as a married woman, I could not consider without impropriety. Knowing
the duty of a daughter, I did not put the question to _you_. You are
yourself the offspring of duty."

"If you were in my place, mamma," reattempted Hesper, but her mother
did not allow her to proceed.

"In any place, in every place, I should do my duty," she said.

It was not only born in Lady Malice's blood, but from earliest years,
had been impressed on her brain, that her first duty was to her family,
and mainly consisted in getting well out of its way--in going peaceably
through the fire to Moloch, that the rest might have good places in the
Temple of Mammon. In her turn, she had trained her children to the
bewildering conviction that it was duty to do a certain wrong, if it
should be required. That wrong thing was now required of Hesper--a
thing she scorned, hated, shuddered at; she must follow the rest; her
turn to be sacrificed was come; she must henceforth be a living lie.
She could recompense herself as the daughters who have sinned by
yielding generally do when they are mothers, with the sin of
compelling, and thus make the trespass round and full. There is in no
language yet the word invented to fit the vileness of such mothers;
but, as time flows and speech grows, it may be found, and, when it is
found, it will have action retrospective. It is a frightful thing when
ignorance of evil, so much to be desired where it can contribute to
safety, is employed to smooth the way to the unholiest doom, in which
love itself must ruthlessly perish, and those, who on the plea of
virtue were kept ignorant, be perfected in the image of the mothers who
gave them over to destruction. Some, doubtless, of the innocents thus
immolated pass even through hideous fires of marital foulness to come
out the purer and the sweeter; but whither must the stone about the
neck of those that cause the little ones to offend sink those mothers?
What company shall in the end be too low, too foul for them? Like to
like it must always be.

Hespe