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.