In a silence if anything more profound than that of their approach, the two young people retired down the drive.  They had not yet learned—­most difficult of lessons—­how to believe that people could in their bones differ from them.  It had always seemed to them that if only they had a chance of putting directly what they thought, the other side must at heart agree, and only go on saying they didn’t out of mere self-interest.  They came away, therefore, from this encounter with the enemy a little dazed by the discovery that Lady Malloring in her bones believed that she was right.  It confused them, and heated the fires of their anger.

They had shaken off all private dust before Sheila spoke.

“They’re all like that—­can’t see or feel—­simply certain they’re superior!  It makes—­it makes me hate them!  It’s terrible, ghastly.”  And while she stammered out those little stabs of speech, tears of rage rolled down her cheeks.

Derek put his arm round her waist.

“All right!  No good groaning; let’s think seriously what to do.”

There was comfort to the girl in that curiously sudden reversal of their usual attitudes.

“Whatever’s done,” he went on, “has got to be startling.  It’s no good pottering and protesting, any more.”  And between his teeth he muttered:  “‘Men of England, wherefore plough?’ . . .”

In the room where the encounter had taken place Mildred Malloring was taking her time to recover.  From very childhood she had felt that the essence of her own goodness, the essence of her duty in life, was the doing of ‘good’ to others; from very childhood she had never doubted that she was in a position to do this, and that those to whom she did good, although they might kick against it as inconvenient, must admit that it was their ‘good.’  The thought:  ‘They don’t admit that I am superior!’ had never even occurred to her, so completely was she unselfconscious, in her convinced superiority.  It was hard, indeed, to be flung against such outspoken rudeness.  It shook her more than she gave sign of, for she was not by any means an insensitive woman—­shook her almost to the point of feeling that there was something in the remonstrance of those dreadful young people.  Yet, how could there be, when no one knew better than she that the laborers on the Malloring estate were better off than those on nine out of ten estates; better paid and better housed, and—­better looked after in their morals.  Was she to give up that?—­when she knew that she was better able to tell what was good for them than they were themselves.  After all, without stripping herself naked of every thought, experience, and action since her birth, how could she admit that she was not better able?  And slowly, in the white room with the moss-green carpet, she recovered, till there was only just a touch of soreness left, at the injustice implicit in their words.  Those two had been ’miserably