"Really, I can hardly swallow the circus."
"You haven't by any chance asked her the question?"
"Dear no! One wouldn't like to ask a question of that sort unless one knew her quite well. I don't think she was ever in a circus at all. Or if she was, she may have been a sort of foundling."
"Stolen by gipsies from the ancestral castle in her infancy. After all, there is nothing to prevent her father being a duke."
"I don't think it would surprise me, although, of course, she is rather odd. But then in all ways she is so different from us."
"Did you observe whether she ate with her knife and drank out of the finger-bowls?"
"Her manners are just like those of anybody else. I am asking Mary to dine here on Friday, so that she can see for herself. It is her ideas that are un-English; yet, judged by her own standard she might be considered quite nice."
"Mrs. Arbuthnot, surely a very generous admission!"
"Let us be fair to everybody. I'm not sure that one couldn't get almost to like her. There is something about her that seems to take right hold of you. Personal magnetism, I suppose."
"Or some uncomfortable Bohemian attribute? Can it be, do you suppose, that the standard the English gentlewoman likes the whole world to conform to would be none the worse for a little wider basis?"