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Updated: June 29, 2025
And cheap journalism, cheap fiction, cheap prudery have not yet reached Spain. "I know nothing," went on the man, with a shrewd, upward nod of the head. "But the Senorita has a lover. He may be faithless, he may be absent, he may be dead but he is there the God be thanked!"
We must separate without bringing our struggle to an issue, one must submit to the other. I could take forcible possession of you as I could of any other woman. But what in another woman is prudery, or petty fear, or stupidity, is in you strength and womanly determination. The mist that divided us is dispersed; we have made our position clear. Nature has endued you with a powerful weapon, Vera.
"However new or old it is, I find it is true," cries Amelia "But, pray, tell me all, though I tremble to hear it." "Indeed, my dear friend," said Mrs. Atkinson, "you are terrified at nothing indeed, indeed, you are too great a prude." "I do not know what you mean by prudery," answered Amelia.
Would she permit it, even if I could muster the courage to suggest it? Then I saw her frame convulse, shudderingly, her muscles reacting to her rapidly lowering temperature, and casting prudery to the winds, I threw myself down beside her and took her in my arms, pressing her body close to mine. She drew away suddenly, voicing a little cry of fright, and tried to push me from her.
"Men of his years do these things sometimes," she said, "under the mask of playfulness and fatherly feeling, and, however unpleasant it may be to bear them, one has to pass them over. You are right, of course, to be reserved with him henceforth, Miriam. By-the-by, dear child, your prudery is excessive, I fear, and it makes a young girl, especially if she is not beautiful, so ridiculous!
It is, however, at this moment the agony-point to the embarrassed lover, who "doats yet doubts" whose suppressed feelings render him morbidly sensitive that a lady should be especially careful lest any show of either prudery or coquetry on her part should lose to her for ever the object of her choice.
Whatever prudery may be when analyzed, it seems perfectly fair to charge it as the substantial cause of the ignorance in which the young generation grows up, as to matters which vitally concern its health and that of future generations. Let us now observe in brief the price of prudery thus arraigned.
What perfect harmony between her manners and her position! just retaining enough of the girl's seductive gayety and bewitching desire to please, to soften the new dignity of bearing she had unconsciously assumed, less, after all, as great lady, than as wife and mother; with a fine breeding, perhaps a little languid and artificial as compared with her lord's, which sprang, fresh and healthful, wholly from nature, but still so void of all the chill of condescension or the subtle impertinence that belongs to that order of the inferior noblesse which boasts the name of "exclusives;" with what grace, void of prudery, she took the adulation of the flatterers, turning from them to her children, or escaping lightly to Lord Castleton, with an ease that drew round her at once the protection of hearth and home!
I don't know what sort of folk they can be, so unfeeling and heartless, that rather than bestow a glance upon a worthy man they leave him to die or go mad. I don't know what is the good of such prudery; if it is for honour's sake, why not marry them? That's all they want."
After the scene to which it has been my painful task to allude in the last chapter, it would have been the very height of prudery on the part of the lady and gentleman, had they avoided speaking on the subject in which they had both become so deeply interested. They did not attempt it. The first excitement over, Margaret entreated her lover to be gone. He did not move.
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