“About this vote business?”
“About all sorts of things. Things I didn't imagine she had heard of. I knew she had been reading books. But I never imagined that she could have understood....”
The bishop laid down his knife and fork.
“One may read in books, one may even talk of things, without fully understanding,” he said.
Lady Ella tried to entertain this comforting thought. “It isn't like that,” she said at last. “She talks like a grown-up person. This—this escapade is just an accident. But things have gone further than that. She seems to think—that she is not being educated properly here, that she ought to go to a College. As if we were keeping things from her....”
The bishop reconsidered his plate.
“But what things?” he said.
“She says we get all round her,” said Lady Ella, and left the implications of that phrase to unfold.
(9)
For a time the bishop said very little.