In a flash, Mrs. Woolley had turned nasty, and Elsie had seen her own unwisdom. “Oh, aren’t they indeed? Perhaps you’d be so kind as to tell me what you are used to--or shall _I_ tell _you_?” Then she suddenly raised her voice almost to a scream and poured out a torrent of abuse and invective, and the two children crept in from the hall and began to cry, and to make faces at Elsie, and demonstrations of hitting her with their little hands, and the servant Florrie held the door half open, so that she might see and hear it all. Elsie screamed back again at Mrs. Woolley, but she had neither the fluency nor the determination of the older woman, and she was unable to prevent herself from bursting into tears and sobs. Finally Mrs. Woolley drove her out of the room, standing at the foot of the stairs while Elsie ran up to pull on her best hat and coat, and forbidding the children to follow her. “Don’t go near her, my pets--she’s a wicked girl, that’s what she is--not fit to be in the same house as innocent little children. Now then, out you go, miss, before I send for the police.” “I’ll go,” said Elsie, shaking from head to foot, “and I’ll never set foot in your filthy house again. And I’ll send for my trunk and for every penny you owe me, and I’ll have the law on you for insinuations on my character.” Then she dashed out of the house and into the street. VI Elsie’s return home caused far less sensation than she had feared. Mrs. Palmer, indeed, was very angry, but principally at Elsie’s folly in having come away without her trunk or the money due to her. When a week had elapsed, and nothing had come from Mortimer Crescent, Mrs. Palmer declared her intention of going to a solicitor. “However you could be such a fool, young Elsie--and I don’t half understand what happened, even now. What was the row about?” Elsie had decided upon a half-truth. “Oh, she was a jealous old fool, and couldn’t bear her hubby to look the same side of the room as anyone else. That’s all it was, really. She spoke to me very rudely, I consider--in fact she was decidedly insulting--so I simply up and said: ‘Mrs. Woolley,’ I said, ‘that’s not the way I’m accustomed to be spoken to,’ I said, ‘and what’s more I won’t stand it.’ Quite quietly, I said it, looking her very straight in the face. ‘I won’t stand it,’ I said, quite quietly. That did for her. She didn’t know how to take it at all. But, of course, I wasn’t going to stay in the house a moment after that, and I simply walked straight upstairs and put on my things and left her there. She knows what I think of her, though.”