Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/400

, at the coolness with which his advances were received, and her attempts to seem not to understand them; but as he prided himself — and not without reason — on his personal attractions and winning ways with the women, and was, besides, so much more a man of sentiment than of passion, as to prize the possession of a woman's heart, however humble, far beyond that of her person, this only piqued his vanity, and made him the more resolved to make a conquest of her.

Nor, indeed, when the master condescends to make love to the slave, the man of the superior class to the woman of the inferior one, a king to a subject, a nobleman to a peasant, or even, if he takes the fancy, to the wife of a citizen, are such conquests in general very difficult. In the case of the slave woman, however transient the connection, it still. for the moment elevates her from her own humble level to that of her lover; and in so doing, does more to raise her in her own eyes, and those of her class, than any. connection she can possibly form within that class — a connection called marriage perhaps, but only by courtesy; since it is not so any more than the other; being, like that other, in the eye of the law, but a transient cohabitation, creating no rights of any sort, giving no paternity to the children, and dissoluble not only at the caprice of the man, but at that also of the master and his creditors.

That very same pride, in fact, which impels the woman of the superior class to shrink with a horror, which seems to her instinctive, from any connection with the men of the inferior class, as a degradation from her own level, a sentiment: not regulated by color, but by condition, — since a white woman of refinement and education would just as soon think of marrying a negro as one of your newly-imported Irish clod-hoppers, even though he might be an Apollo in figure, and, when the dirt was washed off, a perfect Adonis in complexion; — that same pride impels the slave woman readily to throw herself into the arms