She left town next day in a tempest of wrath and indignation, and something like despair. She said to herself that she would go home, where no one would dare to insult her. Home! where, indeed, there would be nobody to insult her, but nobody to care for her; to remark upon her even in that contemptuous way; to say a word even of reprobation. A strong sense of injustice was in her soul. I am strongly of opinion that when any of us commits a great sin, it immediately becomes the most natural, even normal thing in our own eyes; that we are convinced that most people have done the same, only have not been found out; and that the opinion of the world against it is either purely fictitious, a pretence of superior virtue, or else the result of prejudice or personal hostility. Patty had not committed any great sin. She had sought her own aggrandisement, as most people do, but she had gained wealth and grandeur far above her hopes by nothing that could be called wrong; indeed, she had done her duty in the position in which Providence and her own exertions had placed her. It was not her business to look after the interests of the Piercey family, but to take gratefully what was given her, which she had the best of right to, because it had been given her. This was Patty’s argument, and it would be difficult to find fault with it. And to think that the whole cruel world should turn upon her for that; all those gentlefolks whom she despised with the full force of democratic rage against people who supposed themselves her betters, yet felt to the bottom of her heart to be the only arbiters of social elevation and happiness, the only people about whose opinion she cared! She came back to Greyshott in a subdued transport of almost tragic passion. She would seek them no more, neither their approval nor their company. She would go back to her own class, to the class from which she had sprung, who would neither scorn her nor patronise her, but fill Greyshott with admiring voices and adulation, and make her feel herself the greatest lady and the most beneficent. She called for Aunt Patience on her way from the station and carried her back to Greyshott. “You’re going to stay this time,” she said; “I mean to live in my own way, and have my old friends about me; and I don’t care that,” and Patty snapped her fingers, “for what the county may say.” “The county couldn’t say nothing against your having me with you, Patty--only right, everybody would say, and you so young, and men coming and going.” “Where are the men coming and going?” said Patty; “I see none of them. I dare say there would be plenty, though, if it wasn’t for the women,” she added, with a self-delusion dear to every woman upon whom society does not smile. “You take your oath of that!” said Miss Hewitt, who was naturally of the same mind.