that had won her the title of "Duchess"
in this suburb of workmen. She tried to be affable, and her visitors
smarted under a sense of patronage. The language of Buckland Street,
coloured with oaths, the crude fashions of the slop-shop, and the
drunken brawls, jarred on her nerves like the sharpening of a saw. So
she lived, secluded as a nun, mocked and derided by her inferiors.

She was born with the love of the finer things that makes poverty
tragic. She kept a box full of the tokens of the past--a scarf of
Maltese lace, yellow with age, that her grandmother had sent from
England; a long chain of fine gold, too frail to be worn; a brooch set
with diamonds in a bygone fashion; a ring with her father's seal carved
in onyx.

Her daughter Clara was the image of herself in face and manner, and her
grudge against her husband hardened every time she thought of her only
child's future. Clara was fifteen when they descended to Buckland
Street, a pampered child, nursed in luxury. The Duchess belonged to
the Church of England, and it had been one of the sights of Billabong
to see her move down the aisle on Sunday like a frigate of Nelson's
time in full sail; but she had overcome her scruples, and sent Clara to
the convent school for finishing lessons in music, dancing, and
painting.

We each live and act our parts on a stage built to our proportions, and
set in a corner of the larger theatre of the world, and the revolution
that displaces princes was not more surprising to them than the
catastrophe that dropped the Grimes family in Buckland Street was to
Clara and her mother.

Clara had been taught to look on her equals with scorn, and she stared
at her inferiors with a mute contempt that roused the devil in their
hearts. She had lived in the street ten years, and was a stranger in
it. Buckland Street was never empty, but she learned to pick her time
for going in and out when the neighbours were at their meals or asleep.
She attended a church at an incredible distance from Waterloo, for fear
people should learn her unfashionable address. Her few friends lived
in other suburbs whose streets she knew by heart, so that they took her
for a neighbour.

When she was twenty-two she had become engaged to a clerk in a
Government office, who sang in the same choir. A year passed, and the
match was suddenly broken off. This was her only serious love-affair,
for, though she was handsome in a singular way, her flirtations never