human creatures being never so effective as when
assailing in others the vice or weakness we know from
lifelong, intimate, internal association with it. But
secretly the successfully ambitious spurners of that
suburban society were approved, were envied. And
Hanging Rock was most gracious to them whenever
it got the chance.

In her five years of social life Mildred had gone
only with the various classes of fashionable people,
had therefore known only the men who are full of the
poison of snobbishness. She had been born and bred
in an environment as impregnated with that poison
as the air of a kitchen-garden with onions. She knew
nothing else. The secret intention to refuse Stanley
Baird, should he propose, was therefore the more
astonishing--and the more significant. From time to
time in any given environment you will find some
isolated person, some personality, with a trait wholly
foreign and out of place there. Now it is a soft voice
and courteous manners in a slum; again it is a longing
for a life of freedom and equality in a member of a
royal family that has known nothing but sordid slavery
for centuries. Or, in the petty conventionality of a
prosperous middle- or upper-class community you
come upon one who dreams--perhaps vaguely but
still longingly--of an existence where love and ideas
shall elevate and glorify life. In spite of her training,
in spite of the teaching and example of all about her
from the moment of her opening her eyes upon the