''
``Believe me, my dear, you are sacrificing your
character to your ambition.''
``I never had any real character until ambition came,''
replied Mildred. ``The soft, vacillating, sweet and
weak thing I used to have wasn't character.''
``But, dear, you can't think it superior character to
center one's whole life about a sordid ambition.''
``Sordid?''
``Merely to make a living.''
Mildred laughed merrily and mockingly. ``You call
that sordid? Then for heaven's sake what is high?
You had left you money enough to live on, if you have
to. No one left me an income. So, I'm fighting for
independence--and that means for self-respect. Is
self-respect sordid, Cyrilla!''
And then Cyrilla understood--in part, not altogether.
She lived in the ordinary environment of flap-
doodle and sweet hypocrisy and sentimentality; and
none such can more than vaguely glimpse the realities.
Toward the end of the summer Moldini said:
``It's over. You have won.''
Mildred looked at him in puzzled surprise.
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