To be a countess would make many things easier for her, she
thought. Little she knew how immeasurably more difficult it would make
it to do anything whatever worth doing!--that, at the very first, she
would have to fight for freedom--her own--with hidden crafts of slavery,
especially mighty in a region more than any other under the influences
of the prince of the power of the air! She had the foolish notion that,
thus uplifted among the shows of rule, she would be able with more than
mere personal help to affect the load of injustice laid upon them from
without, and pressing them earthwards. She had learned but not yet
sufficiently learned that, until a man has begun to throw off the
weights that hold him down, it is a wrong done him to attempt to lighten
those weights. Why seek a better situation for the man whose increase of
wages will only go into the pocket of the brewer or distiller? While the
tree is evil, its fruit will be evil.
So again the days passed quietly on. Mark grew a little better. Hester
wrote regularly, but the briefest bulletins, to the major, seldom
receiving an acknowledgment. The new earl wrote that he had been to the
funeral, and described in a would-be humorous way the house and lands to
which he had fallen heir.
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