The enormity only gradually beginning to dawn upon Phœbe, all she said was a meditative—‘You would not like that.’
‘You did not realize it,’ he said, nettled at her quiet tone.
‘Do not you understand? You and I, and all of us, have eaten and drunk, been taught more than we could learn, lived in a fine house, and been made into ladies and gentlemen, all by battening on the vice and misery of this wretched population. Those unhappy men and women are lured into the gaudy palaces at the corners of the streets to purchase a moment’s oblivion of conscience, by stinting their children of bread, that we may wear fine clothes, and call ourselves county people.’
‘Do not talk so, Robert,’ she exclaimed, trembling; ‘it cannot be right to say such things—’
‘It is only the bare fact! it is no pleasure to me to accuse my own father, I assure you, Phœbe, but I cannot blind myself to the simple truth.’
‘He cannot see it in that light.’
‘He will not.’
‘Surely,’ faltered Phœbe, ‘it cannot be so bad when one does not know it is—’
‘So far true. The conscience does not waken quickly to evils with which our lives have been long familiar.’
‘And Mervyn was brought up to it—’