"What did she say?"
"She said I was crazy. So did they all. They got the minister to come and argue with me, and he was dreadfully opposed to my wishes at first. But after we'd talked a while, he came round to my way."
"How did you persuade him to that point of view?" Stephen catechized her, wondering always.
"I hardly know. I just told him how I felt about everything. Oh, and I danced."
"By Jove! What effect had that on him?"
"He clapped his hands and said it was a good dance, quite different from what he expected. He didn't think it would do any one harm to see. And he gave me a sort of lecture about how I ought to behave if I became a dancer. It was easy to follow his advice, because none of the bad things he feared might happen to me ever did."
"Your star protected you?"
"Of course. There was a little trouble about money at first, because I hadn't any, but I had a few things—a watch that had been my mother's, and her engagement ring (they were Saidee's, but she left them both for me when she went away), and a queer kind of brooch Cassim ben Halim gave me one day, out of a lovely mother-o'-pearl box he brought full of jewels for Saidee, when they were engaged. See, I have the brooch on now—for I wouldn't sell the things. I went to a shop in Potterston and asked the man to lend me fifty dollars on them all, so he did. It was very good of him."
"You seem to consider everybody you meet kind and good," Stephen said.
"Yes, they almost always have been so to me. If you believe people are going to be good, it makes them good, unless they're very bad indeed."