twenty-six. In three more I shall be in my thirtieth year--that is to
say, the best time of my life will have passed. You see, I have been
thinking, and I have had enough."

He stood quite dumb. The girl's newly-revealed personality seemed to fill
the room. He felt crowded out. She was, at that stage, absolutely
mistress of the situation.... She passed him carelessly by, flung herself
into the easy-chair and crossed her legs. As though he were looking at
some person in another world, he realized that she was wearing shoes of
shapely cut, and silk stockings.

"Our engagement," she went on, "was at first the dearest thing in life to
me. It could have been the most wonderful thing in life. I am only an
ordinary person with an ordinary character, but I have the capacity to
love unselfishly, and I am at heart as faithful and as good as any other
woman. But there is my birthright. I have had three years of sordid and
utterly miserable life, teaching squalid, dirty, unlovable children
things they had much better not know. I have lived here, here in Detton
Magna, among the smuts and the mists, where the flowers seem withered and
even the meadows are stony, where the people are hard and coarse as their
ugly houses, where virtue is ugly, and vice is ugly, and living is ugly,
and death is fearsome. And now you see what I have chosen--not in a
moment's folly, mind, because I am not foolish; not in a moment's
passion, either, because until now the only real feeling I have had in
life was for you. But I have chosen, and I hold to my choice."

"They won't let you stay here," he muttered.

"They needn't," she answered calmly. "There are other ways in which I can
at least earn as much as the miserable pittance doled out to me here. I