Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/406

 the daughter of a drunken tallow-chandler, who had married in her youth the keeper of a small grocery and grog shop, but whose husband, having gone into the business of distilling, had acquired a great fortune, had bought a house in Beacon Street, and being, like his wife, of a pushing and aspiring disposition, had, by a liberal expenditure of money, placed her at the head of the fashion in Boston. This aristocratic lady thought it a most scandalous shame — and she found many sympathizers — that people of good family should be so shockingly imposed upon, as to have such a colored trollop insinuated into the same school with their well-born daughters. Wasn't there a school down in Belknap Street especially intended for colored folks, and why hadn't she been sent there? This sketch of this Mrs Highflyer — for that was the name of this fashionable Boston lady — I must also credit to Eliza, who, to confess the truth, was a good deal of a rogue and a mimic, with an eye to the ridiculous, and a little tendency to caricature.

Nobody seemed to sympathize more completely with Mrs Highflyer than Mr Agrippa Curtis himself, though he had known perfectly well Eliza's origin from the beginning, and had been himself the person to introduce her into Boston society and the fashionable school she had attended. His relation to his deceased brother, of whose property he gave himself out as the heir, made it improper for him, he said, to express himself freely as to his singular conduct, in the introduction into the fashionable society and respectable families of Boston of such a low person; though, in fact, his brother was a strange, unaccountable man in many respects, and to him quite unfathomable. But he did not hesitate to express himself in the most decided terms to poor Eliza, when she called upon him for protection and advice, going so far as actually to order her out of his house, as a vile cheat and impostor.

The keeper of the fashionable boarding house where she lodged was prompt to imitate these