To schoolmate lesser than himself
Pointing you out what thing you are.”
The girl herself, beyond her youth and beauty, is nowise better than her fellows, and so she individualizes a larger pathos, and is in some sense a more touching representative of the victims of man's lust—
“Poor handful of bright spring water
Flung in the whirlpool's shrieking face.”
He is penetrated by the contrast between the fate of this poor girl and that of his cousin, just such another girl in natural disposition—
“And fond of dress, and change, and praise,
So mere a woman in her ways”;
but in the guarded atmosphere of her home, with every point in her character blooming into good.
“So pure—so fallen! how dare to think