-in appearance, at least--let us patch up
some sort of armed truce. For my part you are quite free to indulge any
pose of eccentricity that beguiles you--as long as you observe the
amenities--

MILDRED--[_Drawling._] The inanities?

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