There were other houses now, and huts that could shelter a family, and there was land, land, always more land, as far as she could see, all as closely and neatly and regularly planted with vegetables and grain, vines and olives; and it was all hers, and yielded enormous rents which were wisely invested.
She was very rich indeed, but to her it all seemed horribly sordid and grinding and mean--and the peasants looked prematurely old, labour-worn, filthy, wretchedly poor.

If she had even had any satisfaction from so much wealth, it might have seemed different.

She said so, in her heart.
She was accustomed to tell her confessor that she was proud and uncharitable and unfeeling--not finding any real misdeeds to confess.
She was willing to believe that she was all that and much more.

If she had been living in the whirling, golden pleasure-storm of an utterly thoughtless world, she believed herself bad enough to have shut her memory's eyes to the haggard peasant-mother of the dirty half-clad children--to all the hundreds of them who doubtless lived just like the one she had seen, all upon her lands; she could have forgotten the busy-thieving, sodden-faced crowd that thronged the chambers wherein her fathers had been born and had feasted kings and had died--the very room where her own father had lain dead.

She could have shut it all out, she thought, if she had held in her hands the gold that all this brought, to scatter it at her will; for she was sure that she had not a better heart than other girls of her age.