"May I ask, first, what is meant by the 'chance' and what by the 'circumstances.'"
"Why Mr. Thorn has a fine fortune, you know, and he is of an excellent family--there is not a better family in the city--and very few young men of such pretensions would think of a girl that has no name nor standing."
"Unless she had qualities that would command them," said Mr. Carleton.
"But Mr. Carleton, sir," said the lady,--"do you think that can be? do you think a woman can fill gracefully a high place in society if she has had disadvantages in early life to contend with that were calculated to unfit her for it?"
"But mamma," said Constance,--"Fleda don't shew any such thing."
"No, she don't shew it," said Mrs. Evelyn,--"but I am not talking of Fleda--I am talking of the effect of early disadvantages. What do you think, Mr. Carleton?"
"Disadvantages of what kind, Mrs. Evelyn?"
"Why, for instance--the strange habits of intercourse, on familiar terms, with rough and uncultivated people,--such intercourse for years--in all sorts of ways,--in the field and in the house,--mingling with them as one of them--it seems to me it must leave its traces on the mind and on the habits of acting and thinking?"
"There is no doubt it does," he answered with an extremely unconcerned face.
"And then there's the actual want of cultivation," said Mrs. Evelyn, warming;--"time taken up with other things, you know,--usefully and properly, but still taken up,--so as to make much intellectual acquirement and accomplishments impossible; it can't be otherwise, you know,--neither opportunity nor instructors; and I don't think anything can supply the want in after life--it isn't the mere things themselves which may be acquired--the mind should grow up in the atmosphere of them--don't you think so, Mr. Carleton?"