I have had three years of sordid and utterly miserable life, teaching squalid, dirty, unlovable children things they had much better not know.

I have lived here, here in Detton Magna, among the smuts and the mists, where the flowers seem withered and even the meadows are stony, where the people are hard and coarse as their ugly houses, where virtue is ugly, and vice is ugly, and living is ugly, and death is fearsome.

And now you see what I have chosen--not in a moment's folly, mind, because I am not foolish; not in a moment's passion, either, because until now the only real feeling I have had in life was for you.

But I have chosen, and I hold to my choice." "They won't let you stay here," he muttered.
"They needn't," she answered calmly.

"There are other ways in which I can at least earn as much as the miserable pittance doled out to me here.