poor, body
and soul? Who are you, to dictate their private lives? If they pay their
rent, that should be enough for you."

Lady Malloring moved swiftly again toward the bell. She paused with her
hand on it, and said:

"I am sorry for you two; you have been miserably brought up!"

There was a silence; then Derek said quietly:

"Thank you; we shall remember that insult to our people. Don't ring,
please; we're going."

In a silence if anything more profound than that of their approach, the
two young people retired down the drive. They had not yet learned--most
difficult of lessons--how to believe that people could in their bones
differ from them. It had always seemed to them that if only they had
a chance of putting directly what they thought, the other side must
at heart agree, and only go on saying they didn't out of mere
self-interest. They came away, therefore, from this encounter with the
enemy a little dazed by the discovery that Lady Malloring in her bones
believed that she was right. It confused them, and heated the fires of
their anger.

They had shaken off all private dust before Sheila spoke.

"They're all like that--can't see or feel--simply certain they're
superior! It makes--it makes me hate them! It's terrible, ghastly."
And while she stammered out those little stabs of speech, tears of rage
rolled down her cheeks.

Derek put his arm round her waist.

"All right! No good groaning; let's think seriously what to do."

There was comfort to the girl in that curiously sudden reversal of their
usual attitudes.

"Whatever's done," he went on, "has got to be startling. It's no good
pottering and protesting, any more." And between his teeth he muttered:
"'Men of England, wherefore plough?'..."

In the room where the encounter had taken place Mildred Malloring was
taking her time to recover. From very childhood she had felt that the
essence of her own goodness, the essence of her duty in life, was the
doing of 'good' to others; from very childhood she had never doubted
that she was in a position to do this, and that those to whom she did
good, although they might kick against it as inconvenient, must admit
that it WAS their 'good.' The thought: 'They don't admit that I am
superior!' had never even occurred to her, so completely was she
unselfconscious, in her convinced superiority. It was hard, indeed, to
be flung against such outspoken rudeness. It shook her more than she
gave sign of, for she was n