"Have you?" said Beth. "Why, it isn't five o'clock yet!"
"Miss Blackburne won't let us work long hours," the girl rejoined. "She says it destroys our freshness. But let us know each other's names. I am Geraldine Tressillion. Good name for a novel, isn't it?" and she clapped her little white hands and laughed again.
"That's just what you're made to be—the heroine of a novel," Clara Herring observed, looking at her admiringly. "I always think of you when I come across a gay one, with golden hair and blue eyes."
"I have my good points, I know," Geraldine rejoined. "But how about my hips? Too high, alas!"
"Oh, that won't show much while you're slight," said Clara, looking at her critically.
"Well, I'll make haste and marry me before I'm afflicted with flesh, as I'm sure to become. For I deny myself nothing—I live to eat," Geraldine rattled on cheerfully. "One can't get very fat before one comes out; and I hate a thin dowager. I'm engaged already, you know, but I don't like the man much—don't like him at all, in fact; and my sister says I can do better. She's been married a year, and has a baby. She told me all about it. Mamma imagines we're all innocent. A lady implored her to tell my sister things before she married, but she said she really could not speak to an innocent girl on such a subject. I don't believe she was ever so innocent herself. A grown girl can't be innocent unless she's a fool; but anyway, it's the right pose to pretend. You've got to play the silly fool to please a man; then he feels superior."
"But it's hypocritical," said Beth.
"Yes, my dear. But you must be hypocritical if you want to be a man's ideal of a woman. You must know nothing, do nothing, see nothing, but just what suits his pleasure and convenience; and in order to answer to his requirements you must be either a hypocrite, or a blind worm without eyes or intelligence. Men don't like innocence because it's holy, but because it whets their appetites, my sister says, and if they're deceived it serves them right. They work the world for their own pleasure, not ours; and we must look out for ourselves. If we want money, liberty, devotion, admiration, and any other luxury, we must pretend. Don't you see?"
"I don't know," Beth rejoined. "But, personally, I shall never pretend anything."
"Then you will suffer for your sincerity," Geraldine rejoined.