Well, I hope Whitechapel will provide the
needed nerve tonic. Do not ask me to chaperone you there, however.
I told your father I would not. I loathe deformity. We will hire
an army of detectives and you may investigate everything--they
allow you to see.
MILDRED--[Protesting with a trace of genuine earnestness.] Please
do not mock at my attempts to discover how the other half lives.
Give me credit for some sort of groping sincerity in that at
least. I would like to help them. I would like to be some use in
the world. Is it my fault I don't know how? I would like to be
sincere, to touch life somewhere. [With weary bitterness.] But I'm
afraid I have neither the vitality nor integrity. All that was
burnt out in our stock before I was born. Grandfather's blast
furnaces, flaming to the sky, melting steel, making millions--then
father keeping those home fires burning, making more millions--and
little me at the tail-end of it all. I'm a waste product in the
Bessemer process--like the millions. Or rather, I inherit the
acquired trait of the by-product, wealth, but none of the energy,
none of the strength of the steel that made it. I am sired by gold
and darned by it, as they say at the race track--damned in more
ways than one, [She laughs mirthlessly].
AUNT--[Unimpressed--superciliously.
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