Hester Mason having committed a faux pas, was instantly, and from that very cause, looked upon by all the men, young and old, as a woman "to be had for the asking." In their simplicity, they could admit of no gradations between a Lucretia and Messalina. If a woman were not as chaste as ice, she must necessarily be utterly abandoned. If one man had succeeded in overcoming her scruples, of course another might. The dolts!
Perhaps it is owing to our prudery, which keeps so strict a surveillance over every word and act, that the smallest licence seems to imply the extremity of licentiousness!
The school-boy notion of the facility of women was at the bottom of their minds, and with beautiful simplicity some of the "knowing dogs" commenced the attack upon Hester's virtue, without even thinking it necessary to adopt a semblance of respect and attachment.
Certainly Hester was not a woman, under any circumstances, to have admitted the addresses of these men; but now, the undisguised insolence and fatuity of their approaches not only made her cheek burn with shame, but made her heart sick with disgust.
With scorn and withering sarcasms she discomfited them one after the other. The contemptible fools instantly joined the chorus of the women; and with good proof that at any rate, she was not altogether abandoned, they were unanimous in their execration of her infamy.
If women were not purer, stronger, and honester than the dull and coarse imaginations of most men depict them, what a world this would be! what children would these women bring forth!
Those men who have known women, known how great their influence for good and for evil, known what a well of feeling, of pure, spontaneous nature, untarnished by contact with the world, there lies hidden in a woman's breast; those who have known how this nature has moulded their own minds, refined its coarseness, giving beauty to its strength, will exclaim with me: what a world would this be were women what men generally suppose them!
Here is Hester Mason, certainly not a good specimen of her sex: vain, capricious, wilful, sensual, perverted by sounding sophisms respecting the rights of women, and the injustice of the marriage laws; she acts up to her opinions, and throws herself away upon a rich and titled noodle for the sake of furthering her ambitious projects; she finds out her mistake, returns home repentant, and instantly a number of ill-conditioned, coarse-minded, coarse-mannered men imagine she cannot hesitate to stoop to them! Believing that she acted from unrestrained licentiousness, they interpreted one act, in this school-boy fashion, and hoped to profit by her weakness. But they found out their mistake; or rather never found it out, for they attributed her refusal to viler motives than those to which they would have attributed her consent.
The insult of their proposals struck deep into her heart—deeper far than the scorn of her own sex; and it made her so wretched, that, at last, it drove her once more from her home. Yes, home became insupportable, and in a moment of desperation she fled; fled to London, and there endeavoured to seek oblivion in the turbulent vortex of a career which one shudders to contemplate.
Of all the tortures, of all the humiliations to which she had submitted, none equalled that of meeting Cecil. In her strange unhappy life there had been but one short dream, and that was her love for Cecil; even when he had rejected her love, and humiliated her by his rejection, she still felt towards him something of that elevating, purifying attachment which forms a sort of serene heaven smiling upon the most abject condition—which is, as it were, the ideal region where the purest, brightest thoughts take refuge. And to meet him in the streets—to appear before his eyes in the flaunting finery of disgrace—to let him see the abyss into which she had fallen! Poor girl! if her errors had no other expiation than that, bitterly would she have expiated them.