"England is your country?" asked Frances.
"Yes."
"And you don't like it?"
"I'd be sorry to like it! A little corrupt, venal, lord-and-king-cursed nation, full of mucky pride (as they say in----shire), and helpless pauperism; rotten with abuses, worm-eaten with prejudices!"
"You might say so of almost every state; there are abuses and prejudices everywhere, and I thought fewer in England than in other countries."
"Come to England and see. Come to Birmingham and Manchester; come to St. Giles' in London, and get a practical notion of how our system works.
Examine the footprints of our august aristocracy; see how they walk in blood, crushing hearts as they go. Just put your head in at English cottage doors; get a glimpse of Famine crouched torpid on black hearthstones; of Disease lying bare on beds without coverlets, of Infamy wantoning viciously with Ignorance, though indeed Luxury is her favourite paramour, and princely halls are dearer to her than thatched hovels----"
"I was not thinking of the wretchedness and vice in England; I was thinking of the good side--of what is elevated in your character as a nation."
"There is no good side--none at least of which you can have any knowledge; for you cannot appreciate the efforts of industry, the achievements of enterprise, or the discoveries of science: narrowness of education and obscurity of position quite incapacitate you from understanding these points; and as to historical and poetical associations, I will not insult you, mademoiselle, by supposing that you alluded to such humbug."
"But I did partly."
Hunsden laughed--his laugh of unmitigated scorn.
"I did, Mr. Hunsden. Are you of the number of those to whom such associations give no pleasure?"
"Mademoiselle, what is an association? I never saw one. What is its length, breadth, weight, value--ay, VALUE? What price will it bring in the market?"
"Your portrait, to any one who loved you, would, for the sake of association, be without price."
That inscrutable Hunsden heard this remark and felt it rather acutely, too, somewhere; for he coloured--a thing not unusual with him, when hit unawares on a tender point. A sort of trouble momentarily darkened his eye, and I believe he filled up the transient pause succeeding his antagonist's home-thrust, by a wish that some one did love him as he would like to be loved--some one whose love he could unreservedly return.
The lady pursued her temporary advantage.
"If your world is a world without associations, Mr. Hunsden, I no longer wonder that you hate England so. I don't clearly know what Paradise is, and what angels are; yet taking it to be the most glorious region I can conceive, and angels the most elevated existences--if one of them--if Abdiel the Faithful himself" (she was thinking of Milton) "were suddenly stripped of the faculty of association, I think he would soon rush forth from 'the ever-during gates,' leave heaven, and seek what he had lost in hell. Yes, in the very hell from which he turned 'with retorted scorn.'"