She had indeed been brought up in palaces and the men whom she had known had been reckoned the salt of the earth.

Yet, at that crisis, she was most profoundly conscious that not all the glamour of those high-sounding names, the picturesque interest of those gorgeous uniforms, nor the men themselves, magnificent in their way, were able to make the slightest appeal to her.

She remembered some of her own bitter words when an alliance with one of them had been suggested to her.

It was she, then, who had been the first to ignore the divine heritage of birth, who had spoken of their drinking habits, pointed to their life of idle luxury and worse than luxury.

The man who was at the present moment her suitor forced himself upon her recollection.