Teaser Tuesdays: Another Epidemic

This week my Teaser lines come from Edith Wharton's The Old Maid, one of the works I'm reading for the November Novella Challenge. In this quote, Delia Ralston is listening to her unmarried sister Charlotte talking about why she's decided not to marry the man she was engaged to, and finding it hard to understand Charlotte's enthusiasm for looking after the children of the "ignorant and careless" poor [from Chapter I, p.383 of Novellas and Other Writings by Edith Wharton, Library of America edition]:

No one in New York had forgotten the death of the poor Henry van der Luydens' only child, who had caught smallpox at the circus to which an unprincipled nurse had surreptitiously taken him. After such a warning as that, parents felt justified in every precaution against contagion.

Well, maybe not all that tempting a teaser, but it is sort of timely, isn't it? Of course, H1N1 isn't quite as deadly as smallpox was in the 19th century – so far, at least. Just hope it stays that way.

Photo of Edith Wharton: Wikipedia's Wikimedia Commons.

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by mizB17 at Should Be Reading. If you'd like to read more teasers, or participate yourself, head on over to her blog. And these are the rules: Grab your current read; Let the book fall open to a random page. Share with us two (2) "teaser" sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12. You also need to share the title of the book that you're getting your "teaser" from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given! Please avoid spoilers!