She regarded me with a curious musing frown. "Strange! Do you know what _I_ felt?" I shook my head smiling, and pressed my lips on the soft small hand I held. "Nothing!" she said, with a kind of hopeless gesture--"I assure you, absolutely nothing! I cannot feel. I am one of your modern women,--I can only think,--and analyse." "Think and analyse as much as you will, my queen,"--I answered playfully--"if you will only think you can be happy with me. That is all I desire." "Can you be happy with _me_?" she asked--"Wait--do not answer for a moment, till I tell you what I am. You are altogether mistaken in me." She was silent for some minutes, and I watched her anxiously. "I was always intended for this"--she said slowly at last,--"this, to which I have now come,--to be the property of a rich man. Many men have looked at me with a view to purchase, but they could not pay the price my father demanded. Pray do not look so distressed!--what I say is quite true and quite commonplace,--all the women of the upper classes,--the unmarried ones,--are for sale now in England as utterly as the Circassian girls in a barbarian slave-market. I see you wish to protest, and assure me of your devotion,--but there is no need of this,--I am quite sure you love me,--as much as any man can love,--and I am content. But you do not know me really,--you are attracted by my face and form,--and you admire my youth and innocence, which you think I possess. But I am not young--I am old in heart and feeling. I was young for a little while at Willowsmere, when I lived among flowers and birds and all the trustful honest creatures of the woods and fields,--but one season in town was sufficient to kill my youth in me,--one season of dinners and balls, and--fashionable novel-reading. Now _you_ have written a book, and therefore you must know something about the duties of authorship,--of the serious and even terrible responsibility writers incur when they send out to the world books full of pernicious and poisonous suggestion to contaminate the minds that have hitherto been clean and undiseased. Your book has a noble motive; and for this I admire it in many parts, though to me it is not as convincing as it might have been. It is well written too; but I gained the impression while reading it, that you were not altogether sincere yourself in the thoughts you strove to inculcate,--and that therefore you just missed what you should have gained." "I am sure you are right,"--I said, with a wholesome pang of humiliation--"The book is worthless as literature,--it is only the 'boom' of a season!"