She stood at the top of the three or four steps that descended to the level of the hothouse floor.  She receded a pace or two, with a certain offended dignity at the determination of my rush.

I gave her no sort of salutation.

Well, as a matter of fact, I did give her a sort of salutation.  There is no occasion for me to begin apologizing now for the thing I said to her—­I strip these things before you—­if only I can get them stark enough you will understand and forgive.  I was filled with a brutal and overpowering desire to insult her.

And so I addressed this poor little expensive old woman in the following terms, converting her by a violent metonymy into a comprehensive plural.  “You infernal land thieves!” I said point-blank into her face.  “Have you come to offer them money?”

And without waiting to test her powers of repartee I passed rudely beyond her and vanished, striding with my fists clenched, out of her world again. . .

I have tried since to imagine how the thing must have looked to her.  So far as her particular universe went I had not existed at all, or I had existed only as a dim black thing, an insignificant speck, far away across her park in irrelevant, unimportant transit, until this moment when she came, sedately troubled, into her own secure gardens and sought for Stuart among the greenhouses.  Then abruptly I flashed into being down that green-walled, brick-floored vista as a black-avised, ill-clad young man, who first stared and then advanced scowling toward her.  Once in existence I developed rapidly.  I grew larger in perspective and became more and more important and sinister every moment.  I came up the steps with inconceivable hostility and disrespect in my bearing, towered over her, becoming for an instant at least a sort of second French Revolution, and delivered myself with the intensest concentration of those wicked and incomprehensible words.  Just for a second I threatened annihilation.  Happily that was my climax.

And then I had gone by, and the Universe was very much as it had always been except for the wild swirl in it, and the faint sense of insecurity my episode left in its wake.

The thing that never entered my head in those days was that a large proportion of the rich were rich in absolute good faith.  I thought they saw things exactly as I saw them, and wickedly denied.  But indeed old Mrs. Verrall was no more capable of doubting the perfection of her family’s right to dominate a wide country side, than she was of examining the Thirty-nine Articles or dealing with any other of the adamantine pillars upon which her universe rested in security.

No doubt I startled and frightened her tremendously.  But she could not understand.

None of her sort of people ever did seem to understand such livid flashes of hate, as ever and again lit the crowded darkness below their feet.  The thing leapt out of the black for a moment and vanished, like a threatening figure by a desolate roadside lit for a moment by one’s belated carriage-lamp and then swallowed up by the night.  They counted it with nightmares, and did their best to forget what was evidently as insignificant as it was disturbing.