At any expense, let there be openness.

Take courage, my child, and speak out.
Dare to speak, I say, and that will give you strength to resist, should disobedience become a duty.

Letty's first false step was here: she said to herself _I can not_, and did not.

She lacked courage--a want in her case not much to be wondered at, but much to be deplored, for courage of the true sort is just as needful to the character of a woman as of a man.

Had she spoken, she might have heard true things of Tom, sufficient so to alter her opinion of him as, at this early stage of their intercourse, to alter the _set_ of her feelings, which now was straight for him.