Mr. Plowden turned pale at her taunt, and even in the midst of her fear and misery Eva smiled, and thought to herself that it was lucky for her hateful lover that somebody else was “out of the way.”
Poor Eva!
“Poor Eva!” you think to yourself, my reader. “There was nothing poor about her. She was weak; she was wicked and contemptible.”
O, pause awhile before you say so! Remember that circumstances were against her; remember that the ideas of duty and of gain drilled into her breast and the breasts of her ancestresses from generation to generation, and fated as often as not to prove more of a bane than a blessing, were against her; remember that her sister’s ever-present influence overshadowed her, and that her suitor’s vulgar vitality crushed her to the ground.
“Yet with it all she was
