"To whom? Not to Crossley, and not to Moldini, and why should I care what any others think? They are not paying my expenses. And regardless of what they think now, they'll be at my feet if I succeed, and they'll put me under theirs if I don't."
"How hard you have grown," cried Cyrilla.
"How sensible, you mean. I've merely stopped being a self-deceiver and a sentimentalist."
"Believe me, my dear, you are sacrificing your character to your ambition."
"I never had any real character until ambition came," replied Mildred. "The soft, vacillating, sweet and weak thing I used to have wasn't character."
"But, dear, you can't think it superior character to center one's whole life about a sordid ambition."
"Sordid?"
"Merely to make a living."
Mildred laughed merrily and mockingly. "You call that sordid? Then for heaven's sake what is high? You had left you money enough to live on, if you have to. No one left me an income. So, I'm fighting for independence—and that means for self-respect. Is self-respect sordid, Cyrilla!"
And then Cyrilla understood—in part, not altogether. She lived in the ordinary environment of flap-doodle and sweet hypocrisy and sentimentality; and none such can more than vaguely glimpse the realities.