AUNT--[_Going on as if she hadn't heard._] After exhausting the morbid thrills of social service work on New York's East Side--how they must have hated you, by the way, the poor that you made so much poorer in their own eyes!--you are now bent on making your slumming international. Well, I hope Whitechapel will provide the needed nerve tonic. Do not ask me to chaperone you there, however. I told your father I would not. I loathe deformity. We will hire an army of detectives and you may investigate everything--they allow you to see. MILDRED--[_Protesting with a trace of genuine earnestness._] Please do not mock at my attempts to discover how the other half lives. Give me credit for some sort of groping sincerity in that at least. I would like to help them. I would like to be some use in the world. Is it my fault I don't know how? I would like to be sincere, to touch life somewhere. [_With weary bitterness._] But I'm afraid I have neither the vitality nor integrity. All that was burnt out in our stock before I was born. Grandfather's blast furnaces, flaming to the sky, melting steel, making millions--then father keeping those home fires burning, making more millions--and little me at the tail-end of it all. I'm a waste product in the Bessemer process--like the millions. Or rather, I inherit the acquired trait of the by-product, wealth, but none of the energy, none of the strength of the steel that made it. I am sired by gold and darned by it, as they say at the race track--damned in more ways than one, [_She laughs mirthlessly_]. AUNT--[_Unimpressed--superciliously._] You seem to be going in for sincerity to-day. It isn't becoming to you, really--except as an obvious pose. Be as artificial as you are, I advise. There's a sort of sincerity in that, you know. And, after all, you must confess you like that better. MILDRED--[_Again affected and bored._] Yes, I suppose I do. Pardon me for my outburst. When a leopard complains of its spots, it must sound rather grotesque. [_In a mocking tone._] Purr, little leopard. Purr, scratch, tear, kill, gorge yourself and be happy--only stay in the jungle where your spots are camouflage. In a cage they make you conspicuous. AUNT--I don't know what you are talking about. MILDRED--It would be rude to talk about anything to you. Let's just talk. [_She looks at her wrist watch._] Well, thank goodness, it's about time for them to come for me. That ought to give me a new thrill, Aunt. AUNT--[_Affectedly troubled._] You don't mean to say you're really going? The dirt--the heat must be frightful-- MILDRED--Grandfather started as a puddler. I should have inherited an immunity to heat that would make a salamander shiver. It will be fun to put it to the test. AUNT--But don't you have to have the captain's--or someone's--permission to visit the stokehole?