“Talking? They are shrieking! It is to be hoped, for your own sake, that you are going to marry Grettan Quintard, and that you will let me announce the engagement at once.” Hermia sprang to her feet, overturning her chair. She had a book in her hand, and she flung it across the room. Her eyes were blazing and her face was livid. “Don’t ever dare mention that man’s name to me again!” she cried. “I hate him! I hate him! And don’t bring me any more tales about what people are saying. I don’t care what they say! I scorn them all! What are they but a set of jibbering automatons? One year has made me loathe the bloodless, pulseless, colorless, artificial thing you call society. Those people whose names and position each bows down to in the other are not human beings! they are but a handful of fungi on the great plant of humanity! If they were wrenched from their roots and crushed out of life to-morrow, their poor, little, miserable, self-satisfied numbers would not be missed. Of what value are they in the scheme of existence save to fatten and puff in the shade of a real world like the mushroom and the toadstool under an oak? They are not _alive_ like the great world of real men; not one of them ever had a strong, real, healthy, animal impulse in his life. Even their little sins are artificial, and owe their faint, evanescent promptings to vanity or ennui. I hate their wretched little aims and ambitions, their well-bred scuffling for power in the eyes of each other—_power_—Heaven save the mark! They work as hard, those poor midgets, for recognition among the few hundred people who have ever heard of them, as a statesman does for the admiration of his country! And yet if the whole tribe were melted down into one soul they would not make an ambition big enough to carry its result to the next generation. A year and I shall have forgotten every name on my visiting-list. Great God! that you should think I care for them.” Mrs. Dykman rose to her feet and drew her furs about her. “I do not pretend to understand you,” she said. “Fortunately for myself, my lot has been cast among ordinary women. And as I am a part of the world for which you have so magnificent a contempt, one of the midgets for whom you have so fine a scorn, I imagine you will care to see as little of me in the future as I of you.” She was walking majestically down the room when Hermia sprang forward, and, throwing her arms about her, burst into a storm of tears. “Oh, don’t be angry with me!” she cried. “Don’t! Don’t! I am so miserable that I don’t know what I am saying. I believe I am half crazy.” Mrs. Dykman drew her down on a sofa. “What is the trouble?” she asked. “Tell me.” “There is nothing in particular,” said Hermia. “I am just unstrung. I feel like a raft in the middle of an ocean. I am disgusted with life. It must be because I am not well. I am sure that is it. There is nothing else. Oh, Aunt Frances, take me to Europe.”