"Yes, very good job! Don't you think she's terrible?"
"I do," said Jack.
"I'm glad you do. I can't stand her. I like Mr. George. But I don't care for it when he seems to like me."
Jack roared with laughter again, and again, from some odd corner of herself, she smiled.
"Why do you laugh?" she said. But the infection of laughter made her give a little chuckle.
"It's all such a real joke," he said.
"It is," she answered. "Rather a bad joke."
Slowly he formed a dim idea of her precise life, with a rather tyrannous father who was fond of her in the wrong way, and brothers who had bullied her and jeered at her for her odd ways and appearance, and her slight deafness. The governess who had mis-educated her, the loneliness of the life in London, the aristocratic but rather vindictive society in England, which had persecuted her in a small way, because she was one of the odd border-line people who don't and can't, really belong. She kept an odd, bright, amusing spark of revenge twinkling in her all the time. She felt that with Jack she could kindle her spark of revenge into a natural sun. And without any compunction, she came to tell him.
He was tremendously amused. She was a new thing to him. She was one who knew the world, and society, better than he did, and her hatred of it was purer, more twinkling, more relentless in a quiet way. Her way was absolutely relentless, and absolutely quiet. She had gone further along that line than himself. And her fearlessness was of a queer, uncanny quality, hardly human. She was a real border-line being.
"All right," he said, making a pact with her. "By Christmas we'll ask you to come and see us in the North-West."