He lost his temper altogether at that, and he flung the parcel with violence, and with a violent word, on a chair. “Then at any rate I shall not take that, for it’s not mine!” he cried. “You may keep it, Madam!” And he flung out, his retreat hampered and made humiliating by the entrance of the pupils, who, marshalled by the round-eyed one, and all round-eyed themselves, blocked the doorway at that unlucky moment. He broke through them without ceremony, though they represented the most respectable families in Bristol, and with his head bent he strode wrathfully across the Square. To be turned out of a girls’ boarding-school! To be shown the door like some wretched philandering schoolboy, or a subaltern in his first folly! He, the man of the world, of experience, of ambition! The man with a career! He was furious. “The little cat!” he cried as he went. “I wish I had never seen her face! What a fool, what a fool I was to come!” Unheroic words and an unheroic mood. But though there were heroes before Agamemnon, it is not certain that there were any after George the Fourth. At any rate, any who, like that great man, were heroic always and in all circumstances. Probably Vaughan would have forgiven the little cat had he known that she was at that moment weeping very bitterly, with her face plunged into the pillow of her not over-luxurious bed. For she was young, and a woman. And because, in her position, the name of love was taboo; because to her the admiring look, which to a more fortunate sister was homage, was an insult; because the _petits soins_, the flower, the note, the trifle that to another were more precious than jewels, were not for her, it did not follow that she was not flesh and blood, that she had not feeling, affection, passion. True, the pang was soon deadened, for habit is strong. True, the bitter tears were soon dried, for employers like not gloomy looks. True, she soon cried shame on her own discontent, for she was good as gold. And yet to be debarred, in the tender springtime, from the sweet scents, the budding blooms, the gay carols, to have but one April coach-ride in a desert of days, is hard—is very hard. Mary Smith, weeping on her hopeless pillow—not without thought of the cruel arch stooping to crush her, the cruel fate from which he had snatched her, not without thought of her own ingratitude, her black ingratitude—felt that it was hard, very hard. IX THE BILL FOR GIVING EVERYBODY EVERYTHING!