The Craze of Christina — page 147: what you’re looking at

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

The Craze of Christina. 143 that she is no better than she should be, an abandoned creature unfit to set foot in an honest and virtuous home! Well, it must end, of course. I would turn her out this very night if I could, but Iam sadly afraid that I am com- pelled to give her a week’s notice; still, if I put it sufficiently plainly and strongly, perhaps she will go to-morrow of her own accord, for really, with a young servant like Susan in the house | dread the contamination of her presence, to say nothing of the danger to my own good name, which, thank heaven, I have ever kept fair and spotless! Oh, the wretch—the vile, degraded wretch!’’ And Miss Ashley clenched her fists, and shook them in the air with rage, and with the rage that was so very virtuous there was at the same time a strong mingling of envy and jealousy that could claim kinship with no virtue that has ever been recorded in the cate- chisms of Christianity. For it was gall and bitterness to Miss Ashley to find that this rich young bachelor who had been dropped like a golden sugar-plum into the fluttering midst of the ladies of Middleshire, and who had been preordained, providentially no doubt, to become their prey and their prop- erty, was after ail not a free-lance at all, but a slave already hampered by a discreditable in- Comichookssco