Читать книгу Within the Precincts онлайн

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“It depends upon what you call being insulted,” said Law; “if any man had said that to me, I should have thought him next to an angel. What is insulting about it? If you like money (and who doesn’t like money?) why there’s the easiest way in the world of getting it. Sing! I’d sing my head off,” said Law, “if that was all that was wanted. And you sing for pleasure; you like singing! I can’t tell what you are thinking of. If I had known you were so good as that—but one never thinks much of one’s own sister, somehow,” the youth added, with easy frankness. He was so much excited, however, that he left his tea, and strode up and down the room (three paces and a half, that was all the size of it) repeating “by Jove!” to himself. “If you mean not to do it, you had better not let him know you could do it,” he announced, after an interval. Never in his life before had the easy-going young man been so moved. “It’s untold the money they make,” he said.

As for Lottie, her whole being was in a ferment. She looked at her brother with a gasp of pain. The bread and butter had no charms for her on that night of emotion. She took up her basket which was full of things to mend, and sat down in the window, speechless with vague passion, pain, discontentment. Lottie was not a wise or enlightened young woman. She had not even taken the stamp of her age as many people do who are not enlightened. She had never learned that it was desirable that women should have professions like men. Her thoughts ran entirely in the old-fashioned groove, and it seemed to her that for “a gentleman’s daughter” to work for her living, to be known publicly to work for her living, was a social degradation beyond words to express. It implied—what did it not imply? That the family were reduced to the lowest level of poverty; but that was a small part of it—that the men were useless, worthless, without pride or honour; that they had no friends, no means of saving themselves from this betrayal of all the secrets of pride. These were the foolish feelings in her mind. Gentlemen’s daughters were governesses sometimes she had heard, and Lottie pitied the poor girls (orphans—they were always orphans, and thus set aside from the general rule), with an ache of compassion in her heart; but it was her private impression that this was a stigma never to be wiped off, a stain, not upon the girl, but upon her family who could permit such a sacrifice. Lottie’s view of sacrifice was one which is rarely expressed, but which exists not the less among women and all other persons from whom sacrifices are demanded. Could Alcestis have the same respect after for the man who could let her die for him? Could she go on living by his side and think just the same of him as if he had borne his own burden instead of shuffling it off upon her shoulders? The ancients did not trouble themselves with such questions, but it is a peculiarity of the modern mind that it does. And Lottie, though her point of view was very old-fashioned, still looked at it in this modern way. When Law, whom it was impossible to stir up to any interest in his own work, became so excited over the thought of a possible profession for her, she looked at him with something of the feeling with which Isabella contemplated the caitiff brother in his prison who would have bought his life by her shame. What! would he be “made a man” in such a way? would he buy idleness and ease for himself by exposing her to a life unworthy of “a gentleman’s daughter”? She knew he was lazy, careless, and loved his own gratification; but it hurt her to her very heart to think so poorly of Law, who was the only being in the world whom she had ever been able to love heartily as belonging to herself.