plendid
Princess in Exile in these Dreadful Dingy apartments!"

"I'm afraid I'm anything but a Princess when it comes to earning a
salary," said Ann Veronica. "But frankly, I mean to fight this through
if I possibly can."

"My God!" said Manning, in a stage-aside. "Earning a salary!"

"You're like a Princess in Exile!" he repeated, overruling her. "You
come into these sordid surroundings--you mustn't mind my calling them
sordid--and it makes them seem as though they didn't matter.... I
don't think they do matter. I don't think any surroundings could throw a
shadow on you."

Ann Veronica felt a slight embarrassment. "Won't you have some more tea,
Mr. Manning?" she asked.

"You know--," said Mr. Manning, relinquishing his cup without answering
her question, "when I hear you talk of earning a living, it's as if I
heard of an archangel going on the Stock Exchange--or Christ selling
doves.... Forgive my daring. I couldn't help the thought."

"It's a very good image," said Ann Veronica.

"I knew you wouldn't mind."

"But does it correspond with the facts of the case? You know, Mr.
Manning, all this sort of thing is very well as sentiment, but does it
correspond with the realities? Are women truly such angelic things and
men so chivalrous? You men have, I know, meant to make us Queens and
Goddesses, but in practice--well, look, for example, at the stream of
girls one meets going to work of a morning, round-shouldered, cheap, and
underfed! They aren't queens, and no one is treating them as queens.
And look, again, at the women one finds letting lodgings.... I was
looking for rooms last week. It got on my nerves--the women I saw. Worse
than any man. Everywhere I went and rapped at a door I found behind it
another dreadful dingy woman--another fallen queen, I suppose--dingier
than the last, dirty, you know, in grain. Their poor hands!"

"I know," said Mr. Manning, with entirely suitable emotion.

"And think of the ordinary wives and mothers, with their anxiety, their
limitations, their swarms of children!"

Mr. Manning displayed distress. He fended these things off from him with
the rump of his fourth piece of cake. "I know that our social order is
dreadful enough," he said, "and sacrifices all that is best and most
beautiful in life. I don't defend it."

"And besides, when it comes to the idea of queens," Ann Veronica went
on, "there's twenty-one and a half million women to twenty million men.
Suppose our proper p