Page:Magdalen by J S Machar.pdf/125

 but by her inborn shrewdness Thus the years pass by.

In their twenty-fourth year, our patrician girls begin to fade. They realize it, and withdraw from publicity; with poisoned resignation they again attend the church; down to the bottom of their hearts they despise those younger companions who are still in full bloom. Their tongues are the terror of the whole town.

It is quite different, however, if the cautious mother finds a husband for her daughter: they come to terms, and the obedient daughter exchanges the hero of her dreams for a common, every-day bourgeois, and is happy that she has escaped the preposterous fate of an old maid.

She lives The silenced heart begins suddenly to rebel; she subdues it for a while, but immediately throws herself into the first open arms,—the voice of conscience does not chide her, for do not all the others live the same way? With all that, she remains a