I bit my lip. Though it made me faint to think of it, I could not help imagining what a man—some strutting, decorated soldier or a boorish old country gentleman—would do to my sweet Elsie when her parents parceled her off in dreaded marriage. The old devil would have been lusting after her interminably, and after the funereal tolling of the leaden church bells, he finally might lay his coarse hands on the heavenly curves of her maidenly flesh. Within the prison cell of a great canopied bed in some lonely manse, how eagerly his brutish fingers might strip the confused girl bare, leaving her vulnerable white flesh exposed helplessly to his wicked gaze! Then how he would reach in and touch her, trying to make her naked young body respond inside… To think that he would place his red, swollen,
