She
herself would then be very old--she herself would be dead. Mrs.
Tramore would cover a span of life for which such an allowance of sin
was small. The girl could laugh indeed now at that theory of her
being dragged down. If one thing were more present to her than
another it was the very desolation of their propriety. As she
glanced at her companion, it sometimes seemed to her that if she had
been a bad woman she would have been worse than that. There were
compensations for being "cut" which Mrs. Tramore too much neglected.
The lonely old lady in Hill Street--Rose thought of her that way now-
-was the one person to whom she was ready to say that she would come
to her on any terms. She wrote this to her three times over, and she
knocked still oftener at her door. But the old lady answered no
letters; if Rose had remained in Hill Street it would have been her
own function to answer them; and at the door, the butler, whom the
girl had known for ten years, considered her, when he told her his
mistress was not at home, quite as he might have considered a young
person who had come about a place and of whose eligibility he took a
negative view. That was Rose's one pang, that she probably appeared
rather heartless.
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