“And wear out too,” said Bella soothingly, “this weakness, Lizzie, in favour of one who is not worthy of it.”
“No. I don’t want to wear that out,” was the flushed reply, “nor do I want to believe, nor do I believe, that he is not worthy of it. What should I gain by that, and how much should I lose!”
Bella’s expressive little eyebrows remonstrated with the fire for some short time before she rejoined:
“Don’t think that I press you, Lizzie; but wouldn’t you gain in peace, and hope, and even in freedom? Wouldn’t it be better not to live a secret life in hiding, and not to be shut out from your natural and wholesome prospects? Forgive my asking you, would that be no gain?”
“Does a woman’s heart that—that has that weakness in it which you have spoken of,” returned Lizzie, “seek to gain anything?”
The question was so directly at variance with Bella’s views in life, as set forth to her father, that she said internally, “There, you little mercenary wretch! Do you hear that? Ain’t you ashamed of yourself?” and unclasped the girdle of her arms, expressly to give herself a penitential poke in the side.
“But you said, Lizzie,” observed Bella, returning to her subject when she had administered this chastisement, “that you would lose, besides.