choose for
herself."

It all sounded grim and desperate. Ursula rather hated it.
But her mother's contempt and her father's harshness had made
her raw at the quick, she knew the ignominy of being a
hanger-on, she felt the festering thorn of her mother's animal
estimation.

At length she had to speak. Hard and shut down and silent
within herself, she slipped out one evening to the workshed. She
heard the tap-tap-tap of the hammer upon the metal. Her father
lifted his head as the door opened. His face was ruddy and
bright with instinct, as when he was a youth, his black
moustache was cut close over his wide mouth, his black hair was
fine and close as ever. But there was about him an abstraction,
a sort of instrumental detachment from human things. He was a
worker. He watched his daughter's hard, expressionless face. A
hot anger came over his breast and belly.

"What now?" he said.

"Can't I," she answered, looking aside, not looking at him,
"can't I go out to work?"

"Go out to work, what for?"

His voice was so strong, and ready, and vibrant. It irritated
her.

"I want some other life than this."

A flash of strong rage arrested all his blood for a
moment.

"Some other life?" he repeated. "Why, what other life do you
want?"

She hesitated.

"Something else besides housework and hanging about. And I
want to earn something."

Her curious, brutal hardness of speech, and the fierce
invincibility of her youth, which ignored him, made him also
harden with anger.

"And how do you think you're going to earn anything?"
he asked.

"I can become a teacher--I'm qualified by my
matric."

He wished her matric. in hell.

"And how much are you qualified to earn by your matric.?" he
asked, jeering.

"Fifty pounds a year," she said.

He was silent, his power taken out of his hand.

He had always hugged a secret pride in the fact that his
daughters need not go out to work. With his wife's money and his
own they had four hundred a year. They could draw on the capital
if need be later on. He was not afraid for his old age. His
daughters might be ladies.

Fifty pounds a year was a pound a week--which was enough
for her to live on independently.

"And what sort of a teacher do you think you'd make? You
haven't the patience of a Jack-gnat with your own brothers and
sisters, let alone with a class of children. And I thought you
didn't like dirty, board-school brats."

"They're not all dirty."

"You'd fin