“I know you mean me to understand from that, Miss Child, that you don’t think I’ve any right to force myself on you after you showed me so plainly you thought me a bounder,” said Peter, not mincing his words or stumbling over them.  “But I’m not a bounder.  There must be some way of proving to you that I’m not.  That’s why I’m here for one thing, though there’s another—–­”

“What?” Winifred threw in, frightened, and thinking it better to cut him short in time.

“I want you to meet my mother and let her help you to get some kind of a position more—­more worthy of your talents than this.”

Win laughed aloud.  “You run down your father’s shop?”

“It’s not good enough for you.”

She flushed, and all her pent-up anger against the House of the Hands tingled in that flush.

“You say so because I once had the great honour of being an acquaintance of yours—­and your sister’s,” she hurried breathlessly on.  “For all the rest of the people here, the people you don’t know and don’t want to know, you think it good enough—­too good, perhaps—­even splendid!  It does look so, doesn’t it?  Magnificent!  And every one of your father’s employees so happy—­so fortunate to be earning his wages.  They’re worms—­that doesn’t matter to rich men like you, Mr. Rolls.  Unless, perhaps, a girl happens to be pretty—­or you knew her once and remember that she was an individual.  Oh, you must feel I’m very ungrateful for your interest.  Maybe you mean to be kind—­about your mother.  But give your interest to those who need it.  I don’t.  I’ve seen your name in the papers—­interviews—­things you try to do for the ‘poor.’  It’s a sort of fad, isn’t it—­in your set?  But charity begins at home.  You could do more by looking into things and righting wrongs in your father’s own shop than anywhere else in the world.”

She stopped, panting a little, her colour coming and going She had not meant this at first.  It was far removed from smiling civility, this—­tirade!  But, as Sadie Kirk would say, “He had asked for it.”

He was looking at her with his straight, level gaze.  He was astonished, maybe, but not angry.  And she did not know whether to be glad or sorry that she had not been able to rouse him to rage.  His look into her eyes was no longer that of a young man for a young woman who means much to him.  That light had died while the stream of her words poured out.

For a moment, when she had ceased, they stared at each other in silence, his face very grave, hers flushed and suggesting a superficial repentance.

“Forgive me,” she plumped two words into the pause, as if pumping air into a vacuum.  “I oughtn’t to have said all that.  It was rude.”

“But true?  You think it’s true?”

“Yes.”

“You have been working here in my father’s store for months, and you say I could do more good by righting the wrongs here than anywhere else in the world.  That sounds pretty serious.”