dBooks desire

"My fate is such as I made it, and not lucky for me or for
others involved in it.
"I, too, had an adventure before I went to college; and there was no
one to save me as Major Pendennis saved Pen. Pardon me, Miss Laura, if
I tell this story before you. It is as well that you all of you should
hear my confession. Before I went to college, as a boy of eighteen, I
was at a private tutor's and there, like Arthur, I became attached, or
fancied I was attached, to a woman of a much lower degree and a
greater age than my own. You shrink from me--"
"No I don't," Laura said, and here the hand went out resolutely, and
laid itself in Warrington's. She had divined his story from some
previous hints let fall by him, and his first words at its
commencement.
"She was a yeoman's daughter in the neighborhood," Warrington said,
with rather a faltering voice, "and I fancied--what all young men
fancy. Her parents knew who my father was, and encouraged me, with all
sorts of coarse artifices and scoundrel flatteries, which I see now,
about their house.


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