"Wait a minute. I haven't finished. I want to say this: I never talk about that stage of my career because I'm ashamed of it. I'm ashamed of it because I think I did the wrong thing, not for any other reason. I did it on impulse and I stuck to it out of obstinacy. I mean it would probably have been more sensible to go round with the hat to benevolent people, for the keep of mother and to complete my education. But if we've inherited the Wannop ill-luck, we've inherited the Wannop pride. And I _couldn't_ do it. Besides I was only seventeen, and I gave out we were going into the country after the sale. I'm not educated at all, as you know, or only half, because father, being a brilliant man, had ideas. And one of them was that I was to be an athletic, not a classical don at Cambridge, or I might have been, I believe. I don't know why he had that tic . . . But I'd like you to understand two things. One I've said already: what I hear in this house won't ever shock or corrupt me; that it's said in Latin is neither here nor there. I understand Latin almost as well as English because father used to talk it to me and Gilbert as soon as we talked at all. . . . And, oh yes: I'm a suffragette because I've been a slavey. But I'd like you to understand that, though I was a slavey and am a suffragette--you're an old-fashioned woman and queer things are thought about these two things--then I'd like you to understand that in spite of it all I'm pure! Chaste, you know. . . . Perfectly virtuous." Mrs. Duchemin said: "Oh, Valentine! Did you wear a cap and apron? You! In a cap and apron." Miss Wannop replied: "Yes! I wore a cap and apron and sniffled, 'M'm!' to the mistress; and slept under the stairs too. Because I would not sleep with the beast of a cook." Mrs. Duchemin now ran forward and catching Miss Wannop by both hands kissed her first on the left and then on the right cheek. "Oh, Valentine," she said, "you're a heroine. And you only twenty-two! . . . Isn't that the motor coming?" But it wasn't the motor coming and Miss Wannop said: "Oh, no! I'm not a heroine. When I tried to speak to that Minister yesterday, I just couldn't. It was Gertie who went for him. As for me, I just hopped from one leg to the other and stuttered: 'V . . . V . . . Votes for W . . . W . . . W . . . omen!' . . . If I'd been decently brave I shouldn't have been too shy to speak to a strange man. . . . For that was what it really came to." "But that surely," Mrs. Duchemin said--she continued to hold both the girl's hands--"makes you all the braver. . . . It's the person who does the thing he's afraid of who's the real hero, isn't it?"