and conscience grapples to an excuse as a drowning wretch to a straw.
And yet this hard father--this cautious, moral, money-loving man, three
months afterwards, suffered a rogue--almost a stranger--to decoy him into
a speculation that promised to bring him fifty per cent. He invested in
the traffic of usury what had sufficed to save a hundred such as I am
from perdition, and he lost it all. It was nearly his whole fortune; but
he lives and has his luxuries still: be cannot speculate, but he can
save: he cared not if I starved, for he finds an hourly happiness in
starving himself."

"And your friend," said Philip, after a pause in which his young
sympathies went dangerously with the excuses for his benefactor; "what
has become of him, and the poor girl?"

"My friend became a great man; he succeeded to his father's peerage--a
very ancient one--and to a splendid income. He is living still. Well,
you shall hear about the poor girl! We are told of victims of seduction
dying in a workhouse or on a dunghill, penitent, broken-hearted, and
uncommonly ragged and sentimental. It may be a frequent case, but it is
not the worst. It is worse, I think, when the fair, penitent, innocent,
credulous dupe becomes in her turn the deceiver--when she catches vice
from the breath upon which she has hung--when she ripens, and mellows,
and rots away into painted, blazing, staring, wholesale harlotry--when,
in her turn, she ruins warm youth with false smiles and long bills--and
when worse--worse than all--when she has children, daughters perhaps,
brought up to the same trade, cooped, plumper, for some hoary lecher,
without a heart in their bosoms, unless a balance for weighing money may
be called a heart. Mary became this; and I wish to Heaven she had rather
died in an hospital! Her lover polluted her soul as well as her beauty:
he found her another lover when he was tired of her. When she was at the