"What?"
"If anybody asks where I am, no one will know, except you, my dear; and you will not tell."
"You will be in——"
"In Whitechapel, or thereabouts. Your Angela will be a dressmaker, and she will live by herself and become—what her great-grandmother was—one of the people."
"You will not like it at all."
"Perhaps not; but I am weary of theories, facts, statistics. I want flesh and blood. I want to feel myself a part of this striving, eager, anxious humanity, on whose labors I live in comfort, by whom I have been educated, to whom I owe all, and for whom I have done nothing—no, nothing at all, selfish wretch that I am!"
She clasped her hands with a fine gesture of remorse.
"O woman of silence!" she cried; "you sit upon the heights, and you can disregard—because it is your right—the sorrows and the joys of the world. But I cannot. I belong to the people—with a great big P, my dear—I cannot bear to go on living by their toil and giving nothing in return. What a dreadful thing is a she-Dives!"
"I confess," said Constance coldly, "that I have always regarded wealth as a means for leading the higher life—the life of study and research—unencumbered by the sordid aims and mean joys of the vulgar herd."
"It is possible and right for you to live apart, my dear. It is impossible, because it would be wrong for me."