A Fair Fraud — page 114: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A Fair Fraud 103 Even the worst of women still retain a gleam of unselfishness: It is a quality which is essen- tially feminine, and is the one and only point in which all women are superior to men. Hetty was touched. She knew her mother to be worldly and hard and untruthful—her whole life, in fact, was nothing but a fraudulent lie; but Hetty realised that if her mother sinned it was for her sake, and because she loved her, and she could almost forgive her all the base, bad things against which her own cleaner soul often rebelled most bitterly. ‘Go to bed now, dear,’ she said soothingly. ‘You are tired and overwrought. I will think everything over, and to-morrow things will, perhaps, seem better and clearer to us both. * Mrs Lane wished her child good night, and the soft closing of the door between the rooms told Hetty that she was alone at last. Then the girl sat down again by the fire, and thought long and earnestly over the vexed problems of her troubled life. Hester Lane had been brought up ina bad school. All her life long she had been ac- customed to see the worst side of human nature. Her father’s crime, scarce compre- hended at the time, had nevertheless been fully understood by her as she grew older and wiser, and the shame which she had felt GOMMGIOO <S (GO) uu