Many a poor, seduced girl would have appeared to her less guilty, less degraded than this girl, who, knowing all a man's antecedents, which she evidently did--bad as he was, set herself deliberately to marry him--a well-planned, mercenary marriage, by which she might raise herself out of her low station into a higher, and escape from the drudgery of labor into ease and splendor.
And yet is not the same thing done every day in society by charming young ladies, aided and abetted by most prudent, respectable, and decorous fathers and mothers?
Let these, who think themselves so sinless, cast the first stone at Susan Bennett.
But to Christian, who had never been in society, and did not know the ways of it, the sensation conveyed was one of absolute repulsion.

She rose.
"I fear, Miss Bennett, that if we continued this conversation forever we should never agree.

It only proves to me more and more the impossibility of your remaining my daughter's governess.

Allow me to pay you, and then let us part at once." But the look of actual dismay which came over the girl's face once more made her pause.
"You send me away with no recommendation--and I shall never get another situation--and I have hardly a thing to put on--and I'm in debt awfully.

You are cruel to me, Mrs.Grey--you that have been a governess yourself." And she burst into a passion of hysterical crying.
"What can I do ?" said Christian sadly.