"I can't imagine anything in the whole bad business that could be personal to you."
"No, of course you can't. It's only personal by association—by imagination, probably." She made nothing clearer by adding: "You know I'm not really Uncle Emery's niece, or Aunt Zena's."
He nodded.
"I don't know who my mother was. But whoever she was—I'm sorry for her."
He began to get her idea. "You're probably quite wrong," he said, kindly; "and until you know you're right I shouldn't let fancies of that sort run away with me."
"Oh, I don't. And yet you can see that when I meet any one like Maggie Clare—well, I don't feel superior to her. It's like being a gipsy—George Eliot's Fedalma, for instance—adopted by a kind family, but knowing she's a gipsy just the same."
He brought his knowledge of the world to bear on her. "I assure you you're not in the least like that kind of gipsy."
"Neither was Fedalma like her kind; and yet when she could do something for them she went to them and did it."
"How old are you?" he said, abruptly, asking the same question which but a few weeks before Noel Ordway had put to Edith, and in much the same way.
"We call it twenty-three—because we keep my birthday on the date on which Uncle Emery and Aunt Zena took me; but I must be nearer twenty-five."