To me it meant the loss of the pure reputation I prized, the good name I had guarded--scandal the most terrible a woman could face.

But I had seen the misery of the poor, of my sister-women with children crying for bread; the wages of the workmen were often sufficient for four, but eight or ten they could not maintain.

Should I set my own safety, my own good name, against the helping of these?
Did it matter that my reputation should be ruined, if its ruin helped to bring remedy to this otherwise hopeless wretchedness of thousands?
What was worth all my talk about self-sacrifice and self-surrender, if, brought to the test, I failed?
So, with heart aching but steady, I came to my resolution; and though I know now that I was wrong intellectually, and blundered in the remedy, I was right morally in the will to sacrifice all to help the poor, and I can rejoice that I faced a storm of obloquy fiercer and harder to bear than any other which can ever touch me again.

I learned a lesson of stern indifference to all judgments from without that were not endorsed by condemnation from within.

The long suffering that followed was a splendid school for the teaching of endurance.
The day before the pamphlet was put on sale we ourselves delivered copies to the Chief Clerk of the Magistrates at Guildhall, to the officer in charge at the City Police Office in Old Jewry, and to the Solicitor for the City of London.