" From that moment, on her part there had been no more
merely kind, tranquil thoughts about Scoville, but a shy, trembling,
blushing self-consciousness even when in solitude his image rose
before her.
As she sought to regain composure after the last interview with her
cousin, and to think of her best course in view of what seemed his
dangerous knowledge, a truth, kept back thus far by solemn and
absorbing scenes, suddenly became dear to her. The spirit of all-
consuming selfishness again manifested by Whately, revealed as never
before the gulf of abject misery into which she would have fallen as
his wife. "If it hadn't been for Lieutenant Scoville I might now
have been his despairing bond slave," she thought; "I might have
been any way if the Northern officer were any other kind of a man,
brutal, coarse, as I had been led to expect, or even indifferent and
stupid. I might have been forced into relations from which I could
not escape and then have learned afterward what noble, unselfish men
there are in the world.
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