"I did not know," I heard her say, "that Westenra recited," and then she settled herself in a comfortable attitude to listen. I stood in the middle of the floor, and faced everybody. "I have something to say," I began, "and it is not a recitation. I have asked you all to come here to-day to listen to me." I paused and looked round. How nice our guests looked, how kind, how beautifully dressed! What good form the men were in, and how aristocratic were the women. How different these men and women were from the people I had associated with during the week--the people who took care of the houses in Bloomsbury, the agents who let the houses, the people whom I had met in the busses going to and from the houses. These nice, pleasant, well-bred people belonged to me, they were part and parcel of my own set; I was at home with them. I just caught the Duchess's eye for a moment, and I think there was alarm in those brown depths, but she was too essentially a woman of the world to show anything. She just folded her jewelled hands in her lap, leant back in her chair, and prepared to listen. One or two of the men, I think, raised their eye-glasses to give me a more critical glance, but soon even that mark of special attention subsided. Of course it was a recitation. People were beginning to be tired of recitations. "I want to say something, and I will say it as briefly as possible," I commenced. "Mother does not approve of it, but she will do it, because she has yielded to me as a dear, good, _modern_ mother ought." Here there was a little laugh, and some of the tension was lessened. "I want to tell you all," I continued, "for most of you have been our friends since I was a child, that mother and I are--poor. There is nothing disgraceful in being poor, is there? but at the same time it is unpleasant, unfortunate. We were fairly well off. Now, through no fault of our own, we have lost our money." The visitors looked intensely puzzled, and also uncomfortable, but now I raised my eyes a little above them. It was necessary that if I went on putting them to the test, I should not look them full in the face. "We are poor," I continued, "therefore we cannot live any longer in this house. From having a fair competence, not what many of you would consider riches, but from having a fair competence, we have come down to practically nothing. We could live, it is true, in the depths of the country, on the very little which has been saved out of the wreck, but I for one do not wish to do that. I dislike what is called decent poverty, I dislike the narrow life, the stultifying life, the mean life. I am my father's daughter. You have heard of my father, that is his picture"--I pointed as I spoke to an oil painting on the wall. "You know that he was a man of action, I also will act." I hurried my voice a trifle here--"So mother and I mean not to accept what many people would consider the inevitable; but we mean, to use a vulgar phrase, to better ourselves."