"Nonsense! Weren't you--aren't you as good as he? You are the daughter of a respectable Irish clergyman. Whose daughter--I mean son--is he? A French tailor's, I expect. You married him eighteen years ago in Putney Parish Church by special licence, when he was nothing and nobody cared whom or what he married. Little flighty, undersized foreign-looking creature! You have been a good wife to him, borne his children, nursed him when he was ill, and kept a house going for him to come back to when he was tired of the others, and if it's been done on the sly, it hasn't been through any will of yours! And now that the matter has been taken out of his hands, and a good thing too, and he's obliged to leave off his dirty little tricks and own you, and send his grand friends to call on you, and build a nice house to put you in, you want to back out and hide yourself--lose your chance once for all and for ever! You are good-looking, your children are sweet--you'll soon catch them all up, and then you can be as haughty and stuck-up as the rest of them. If it is _me_ you are thinking of, I shan't trouble you--I have my work and I mean to stick to it!" "I shall never disown you, Gerty." "No, I dare say not, but I shan't put myself in the way of a snub. I've got one thing that's been very useful to me in this life--that's tact. I shan't make a nasty row or a talk, but you'll not see more of me than you want to. I'm a lady--I'll never let anybody deny that--but I've knocked about the world a bit, and it's a rough place, and that soft dainty manner people admire so, rubs off pretty soon fighting one's own battles. The aristocracy can afford to keep it on. Clothes does it, largely. Where you're wearing chiffon, I'll be wearing linen, that's the diff. Now I'm off--'on' first act and share a dresser with three other cats, where there isn't room to swing one. Ta-ta! I'm not as vulgar as you think!" She put on her picture-hat carefully with sixteen pins in it, and went away. Mother asked me why I hadn't been drying my hair in the garden all this time? Because I wanted to hear what Aunt Gerty had to say, I answered, and Mother accepted the explanation. But now I went and found a cool place and meditated on my sins. I am not what is called a strictly naughty child. I am too busy. Satan never need bother about me or find mischief for me to do, for my hands are never idle, and I can generally find it for myself. On the eventful morning that decided our fate three weeks before this incident, I was in the drawing-room, where we hardly ever sit, making devils with George's name with the ink out of the best inkstand. I spilt it. Why do these things happen? It is the fault of fatality.