She was a practical atheist.
It is a fearful thing to permit a child to grow up ignorant of God,
and of the sacred principles of duty which should be inwrought in
the conscience, and enforced by the most vital considerations of
well-being, both for this world and the world to come.
But Ida Mayhew thought not of God or duty, but only of her thwarted,
unhappy life, from which she shrank weakly and selfishly, assuring
herself that she could not and would not endure it. In her father
she saw only increasing humiliation; in her mother, one for whom
she had but little affection and less respect, and who would of
necessity irritate the wounds that time might slowly heal, could she
live in an atmosphere of delicate, unspoken sympathy; in herself,
one whom she now believed to be so ignorant and faulty that the man
she loved had turned away in disgust on finding her out. If all
this were not bad enough, unforeseen and unfortunate circumstances,
even more than her own folly, had brought about a humiliation from
which she felt she could never recover. In her blind, desperate
effort to hide her passion from the man she loved, she had made it
appear that she was infatuated with the man she loathed, and who
had shown himself such a contemptible villain that her association
with him was the scandal of the house.
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