She dived to snatch it up from the floor.
"Miserliness is rather a quality than otherwise, you know," she
continued, holding the cat in her folded arms. "With us it is misers who
can spare money for worthy objects--not the so-called generous natures.
But pray don't think I am a sybarite. My father was a clerk in the
Ministry of Finances with no position at all. You may guess by this that
our home was far from luxurious, though of course we did not actually
suffer from cold. I ran away from my parents, you know, directly I began
to think by myself. It is not very easy, such thinking. One has got to
be put in the way of it, awakened to the truth. I am indebted for my
salvation to an old apple-woman, who had her stall under the gateway
of the house we lived in. She had a kind wrinkled face, and the most
friendly voice imaginable. One day, casually, we began to talk about a
child, a ragged little girl we had seen begging from men in the streets
at dusk; and from one thing to another my eyes began to open gradually
to the horrors from which innocent people are made to suffer in
this world, only in order that governments might exist. After I once
understood the crime of the upper classes, I could not go on living with
my parents. Not a single charitable word was to be heard in our home
from year's end to year's end; there was nothing but the talk of vile
office intrigues, and of promotion and of salaries, and of courting the
favour of the chiefs.
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