In time she should leave school and be a woman. She should, when she left school, be a young woman, and a young woman of no ordinary personal attractions. She knew this as fully as she knew that the perfume of the tuberose is sweet, by the evidence of one of her senses. How should it be with her, then? All these other girls around her would marry, she never. For who would come wooing her? Some other lodger in Grimsby Street! A City clerk, or a prosperous hairdresser, or a furniture dealer, or a man who contracted for the supply of suppers, or a man who beat carpets, or a baker in a white cap, or the son and heir of a tailor! She had no moderation of power to discriminate between any of these. They were all preposterously impossible lovers, and there were no others left! No thing was degrading even to fancy. There was only one way of meeting this aspect of her poverty--she should never marry. That was easy enough. Nothing could be easier than to keep all men at as great a distance as she kept the cabman, or the young man who sold her the double elephant paper for drawing, or the telegraph clerk. No man should, to her dying day, ever say anything to her beyond the mere business words necessary to their meeting. Thus she should be as strong in this way as she was now in her indifference to diamonds or the opera. People said girls were weak, but girls could be as strong as men, stronger than men, if they only made up their minds not to long for pretty, or fine, or interesting objects.
In the latter class Edith supposed lovers would find their place.
She should be strong because she should be self-contained. She should be content because she should be undesiring. She should be independent because she should form no ties of any kind. Her position should be completely unassailable.
So she did not allow herself to display any particular affection for any one of her schoolmates. She was uniformly kind, and gentle, and polite. But she was too poor to love anyone, for it would rend her heart to be separated from one she loved, and she could run no risk of breaking her heart about her poverty when her poverty did not step in to separate her from one on whom she settled her affections.