You see, I should still have been engaged to Eleanor Faversham. . . .
But now this somewhat unholy influence is gone from her. She has lifted
me in her strong arms as a mother would lift a brat of ten. She has
patiently suffered my whimsies as if I had been a sick girl. She has
become to me the mere great mothering creature on whom I have depended
for custard and the removal of crumbs and creases from under my body,
and for support to my tottering footsteps. The glamour has gone from
before my eyes. I no longer see her invested in her queer
splendour. . . .
My invalid peevishness, too, has accentuated my sensitiveness to shades
of refinement. There is about Lola a bluffness, a hardihood of speech,
a contempt for the polite word and the pretty conventional turning of
a phrase, a lack of reticence in the expression of ideas and feelings,
which jar, in spite of my gratitude, on my unstrung nerves. Her
ignorance, too, of a thousand things, a knowledge of which is the
birthright of such women as Eleanor Faversham, causes conversational
excursions to end in innumerable blind alleys.
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