should die; but I fortunately had a brain fever, during which my doctor gave me up, and—and I recovered, and—and here I am poor and friendless."
"How old is he? " Emmy asked.
"Eleven," said Becky.
"Eleven!" cried the other. Why, he was born the same year with Georgy, who is—"
"I know, I know," Becky cried out, who had in fact quite forgotten all about little Rawdon' s age. "Grief has made me forget so many things, dearest Amelia. I am very much changed: half wild sometimes. He was eleven when they took him away from me. Bless his sweet face; I have never seen it again."
"Was he fair or dark?" went on that absurd little Emmy. "Show me his hair."
Becky almost laughed at her simplicity. "Not to-day, love,—some other time, when my trunks arrive from Leipzic, whence I came to this place,—and a little drawing of him, which I made in happy days."
"Poor Becky, poor Becky! " said Emmy. "How thankful, how thankful I ought to be!" (though I doubt whether that practice of piety inculcated upon us by our womankind in early youth, namely to be thankful because we are better off than somebody else, be a very rational religious exercise;) and then she began to think as usual, how her son was the handsomest, the best, and the cleverest boy in the whole world.
"You will see my Georgy," was the best thing Emmy could think of to console Becky. If anything could make her comfortable that would.
And so the two women continued talking for an hour or more, during which Becky had the opportunity of giving her new friend a full and complete version of her private history. She showed how her marriage with Rawdon Crawley had always been viewed by the family with feelings of the utmost hostility; how her sister-in-law (an artful woman) had poisoned her husband's mind against her; how he had formed odious connexions, which had estranged his affections from her; how she had borne everything—poverty, neglect, coldness from the being whom she most loved—and all for the sake of her child; how, finally, and by the most flagrant outrage, she had been driven into demanding a separation from her husband, when the wretch did not scruple to ask that she should sacrifice her own fair fame so that he might procure advancement through the means of a very great and powerful but unprincipled man—the Marquis of Steyne, indeed. The atrocious monster!
This part of her eventful history Becky gave with the utmost feminine delicacy, and the most indignant virtue. Forced to fly her husband's roof by this insult, the coward had pursued his revenge, by taking her child from her. And thus Becky said she was a wanderer, poor, unprotected, friendless, and wretched.
Emmy received this story, which was told at some length, as those persons who are acquainted with her character may imagine that she would. She quivered with indignation at the account of the conduct of the miserable Rawdon and the unprincipled Steyne. Her eyes made notes of admiration for every one of the sentences in which Becky described the
