“Dear lady,” said the stranger, “your gentle face, your gentle voice, your gentle bearing, all proclaim it.”
She looked without flinching into the stranger’s eyes, and gradually a smile banished the reigning dulness of her features.
“How foolish of me.” She spoke rather to herself than to the stranger. “Why, of course, people—people whose opinion is worth troubling about—judge of you by what you are, not by what you go about saying you are.”
The stranger remained silent.
“I am the widow of a provincial doctor, with an income of just two hundred and thirty pounds per annum,” she argued. “The sensible thing for me to do is to make the best of it, and to worry myself about these high and mighty relations of mine as little as they have ever worried themselves about me.”
The stranger appeared unable to think of anything worth saying.
“I have other connections,” remembered Sir William’s cousin; “those of my poor husband, to whom instead of being the ‘poor relation’ I could be the fairy god-mama. They are my people—or would be,” added Sir William’s cousin tartly, “if I wasn’t a vulgar snob.”
She flushed the instant she had said the words and, rising, commenced preparations for a hurried departure.
“Now it seems I am driving you away,” sighed the stranger.
“Having been called a ‘vulgar snob,’” retorted the lady with some heat, “I think it about time I went.”