She felt wounded, weighed down with a perverse sense of injury at his treatment, of injustice at his coldness, even in the face of the incongruous circumstances under which they had met.
But she went on speaking, resolutely, as though to purge her soul, for all time, of explanation and excuse.
"That next-of-kin agency was a dingy little office up two dingy stairs in Chancery Lane.

For a few days their work seemed bearable enough, though it hurt me to see that all their income was being squeezed out of miserably poor people--always the miserably poor, the submerged souls with romantic dreams of impending good fortune, which, of course, always just escaped them.

That, I could endure.

But when I found that the agency was branching out, and was actually trying to present me for inspection as a titled heiress, in sore need of a secret and immediate marriage, I revolted, at once.

Then they calmly proposed that I embark for America, as some sort of bogus countess--and while they were still talking and debating over what mild and strictly limited extravagances they would stand for, and just what expenses they would allow, I bolted! But their scheming and plotting had given me the hint, for I knew, if the worst came to the worst, I would not be altogether under the thumb of Lord Boxspur.