Hester by Margaret Oliphant

The day after this interview, which had excited everybody, and which, not only Mrs. John, but the chorus of attentive neighbours had felt in their hearts to be of the most critical importance, Hester had, as happened sometimes, a commission from her mother -- or rather, as she was the active housekeeper and agent in all their business, a necessity of her own, which took her into Redborough. Mrs. John had been brought up in the age when girls were supposed to be charming and delightful in proportion as they were helpless, and her residence abroad had confirmed her in the idea that it was not becoming, or indeed possible, to permit a young woman "of our class" to go anywhere alone. But what was it possible for the poor lady to do! She could not herself walk into Redborough, a distance which was nothing in the estimation of the young and energetic. All that Mrs. John was capable of, was to bemoan herself, to wring her hands, and complain how dreadfully things were changed, how incapable she herself would have been of going anywhere unaccompanied -- all which galled, almost beyond endurance, the high spirit of Hester, whose proud consciousness of perfect capacity to guard herself wherever she choose to go, was yet so much embittered by the tradition of her mother's prejudice, that her expeditions, harmless as they were, always appeared to her as a sort of confession of lowliness and poverty, and defiance of the world's opinion. Thus she moved swift and proud about the streets, looking neither to the right hand nor the left, with a half-shame, half-scorn of her unprotectedness, which mingled oddly with her indignant contempt of the idea of wanting protection at all. No messenger ever went so quickly, or returned so soon as Hester, under this double inspiration. She skimmed along with "that springy motion in her gait," as straight and as light as an arrow; and before the chorus of the Vernonry had finished communicating to each other the exciting fact that Mrs. John had once more permitted that girl to go into town by herself, and asking each other what she could expect was to come of such proceedings -- Hester would walk back into the midst of their conclave with such a consciousness of all their whisperings in the large eyes with which she contemplated them as she passed to her mother's door, as suddenly hushed and almost abashed the eager gossips.

"She can't have been in Redborough," Miss Matilda would say breathless when the girl disappeared. "Nobody could go so quickly as that. She has never been there at all. Dear Mrs. John, how she is taken in! She must have had some appointment, some rendezvous, there can't be any doubt of it."