I should love it, if I thought I could make a first-rate preacher." "Then why don't you--why DON'T you ?" Her voice rang with defiance.

"If I were a man, nothing would stop me." She held her head erect.

He was rather timid before her.
"But my father's so stiff-necked.

He means to put me into the business, and I know he'll do it." "But if you're a MAN ?" she had cried.
"Being a man isn't everything," he replied, frowning with puzzled helplessness.
Now, as she moved about her work at the Bottoms, with some experience of what being a man meant, she knew that it was NOT everything.
At twenty, owing to her health, she had left Sheerness.

Her father had retired home to Nottingham.