Indeed this beautiful girl, nurtured in a Christian land, a regular
attendant upon church, was a pagan and belonged to a pagan family.
Not one of her household worshipped God. Mr. and Mrs. Marsden
would have been exceedingly shocked and angered if they had been
told they were heathens. But at the time when Paul found among
the multitudinous altars of Athens one dedicated to the "Unknown
God," there were many Grecian men and women more highly cultivated
than these two aristocrats of to-day. But in spite of external
devoutness at church, it could easily be shown that to this girl's
parents the God of the Bible was as "unknown" and unheeded as the
mysterious and unnamed deity concerning whose claims the Apostle
so startled the luxurious Athenians. Like the ancient Greeks, all
had their favorite shrines that, to a greater or a less degree,
absorbed heart and brain.
Lottie was a votaress of pleasure: the first and about the only
article of her creed was to make everything and everybody minister
to her enjoyment. She rarely entered on a day with a more definite
purpose than to have a "good time"; and in the attainment of this
end we have seen that she was by no means scrupulous.
She was as cruel a little pagan, too, as any of her remote Druidical
ancestors, and at her various shrines of vanity, pleasure, and
excitement, delighted in offering human sacrifices. She had become
accustomed to the writhing of her victims, and soothed herself
with the belief that it did not hurt them so very much after all.
She considered no farther than that flirtation was one of the
recognized amusements of the fashionable. What the TON did was law
and gospel to her mother; and the same to Lottie, if agreeable. If
not, there was no law and no gospel for her.
She had no more scruple in making a victim of Hemstead than a Fiji
Island potentate would have in ordering a breakfast according to
his depraved and barbarous taste. And when even society-men had
succumbed to her wiles, and in abject helplessness had permitted
her to place her imperious foot upon their necks, what chance had
a warm-hearted, unsophisticated fellow, with the most chivalric
ideas of womanhood?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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