Stand up bravely by my side."
"And you are in earnest in all this?" said Edith, whose mind seemed
hardly able to realize the truth of their position. From her
earliest days, all the blessings that money could procure had been
freely scattered around her feet. As she grew up and advanced
towards womanhood, she had moved in the most fashionable circles,
and there acquired the habit of estimating people according to their
wealth and social standing, rather than by qualities of mind. In her
view, it appeared degrading in a woman to enter upon any kind of
employment for money; and with the keeper of a boarding-house,
particularly, she had always associated something low, vulgar, and
ungenteel. At the thought of her mother's engaging in such an
occupation, when the suggestion was made her mind instantly
revolted. It appeared to her as if disgrace would be the inevitable
consequence.
"And you are in earnest in all this?" was an expression mingling her
clear conviction of the truth of what at first appeared so strange a
proposition, and her astonishment that the necessities of their
situation were such as to drive them to so humiliating a resource.
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