“She is still pretty,” Eve answered.
“Yet you never saw her making eyes at gentlemen like some; there’s a great deal of making eyes at Potterpins. Rose Bonham, now—she got a silk dress out of Mr. Tennant no longer ago as last March.”
“Mr. Tennant?”
“Yes; the gentleman who superintends the mine. Not that I have anything to say against him; gentlemen has their priviluges. All I say is—girls hasn’t!”
Eve had risen. “I must go; I will come again soon.”
“Oh, miss,” said the woman, dropping her gossip, and returning to her gratitude (which was genuine)—“oh, miss, mayn’t I know your name? I want to put it in me prayers. There was just three cents in the house, miss, when you came; and Lyddy she couldn’t eat the last meal I got for her—a cracker and a piece of mackerel.”
“You can pray for me without a name,” said Eve, going out.
She felt as though there were hot coals in her throat, she could scarcely breathe. She went towards the forest, and, entering it by a cart-track, walked rapidly on. Rose Bonham was the daughter of the butter-woman. Bonham had a forest farm about five miles from Port aux Pins on the road to Betsy Lake, and his wife kept Paul’s cottage supplied with butter. Eve had seen the daughter several times; she was a very beautiful girl. Eve and Cicely thought her bold; but the women who eat the butter are apt to think so of those who bring it, if the bringers have sparkling eyes, peach-like complexions, and the gait of Hebe.
And Paul himself had suggested the spending the night there—an entirely unnecessary thing—under the pretence of gaining thereby an earlier start in the morning.
She came to a little pool of clear water; pausing beside it, half unconsciously, she beheld the reflection of her face in its mirror, and something seemed to say to her, “What is your education, your culture, your senseless pride worth, when compared with the peach-like bloom of that young girl?” Her own image looked up at her, pale, cold, and stern; it did not seem to her to have a trace of beauty. She took a stone, and, casting it in the pool, shattered the picture. “I wish I were beautiful beyond words! I could be beautiful if I had everything; if nothing but the finest lace ever touched me, if I never raised my hand to do anything for myself, if I had only dainty and delicate and beautiful things about me, I should be beautiful—I know I should. Bad women have those things, they say; why haven’t they the best of it?”