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.