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Cashel Byron's Profession by George Bernard Shaw
page 36 of 324 (11%)

"That pleases me, Lydia, because I believe you. But such things are
better left unsaid. They seem to belong to the art of pleasing,
which you will perhaps soon be tempted to practise, because it seems
to ail young people easy, well paid, amiable, and a mark of good
breeding. In truth it is vulgar, cowardly, egotistical, and
insincere: a virtue in a shopman; a vice in a free woman. It is
better to leave genuine praise unspoken than to expose yourself to
the suspicion of flattery."

Shortly after this, at his desire, she spent a season in London, and
went into English polite society, which she found to be in the main
a temple for the worship of wealth and a market for the sale of
virgins. Having become familiar with both the cult and the trade
elsewhere, she found nothing to interest her except the English
manner of conducting them; and the novelty of this soon wore off.
She was also incommoded by her involuntary power of inspiring
affection in her own sex. Impulsive girls she could keep in awe; but
old women, notably two aunts who had never paid her any attention
during her childhood, now persecuted her with slavish fondness, and
tempted her by mingled entreaties and bribes to desert her father
and live with them for the remainder of their lives. Her reserve
fanned their longing to have her for a pet; and, to escape them, she
returned to the Continent with her father, and ceased to hold any
correspondence with London. Her aunts declared themselves deeply
hurt, and Lydia was held to have treated them very injudiciously;
but when they died, and their wills became public, it was found that
they had vied with one another in enriching her.

When she was twenty-five years old the first startling event of her
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