'It is,' I said. 'There is hardly a day when I do not come in
contact with it.'

'Well, that is surely a good thing. And I find that calm poise of
hers very restful.'

'I would not have believed that so many virtues could reside in one
young lady,' I said, taking refuge in flippancy, 'and to think that
she should be my daughter!'

'As I believe you know, that seems to me rather a cruel stroke of
destiny, Mrs. Farnham.'

'Oh yes, I know! You have a constructive imagination, Dacres. You
don't seem to see that the girl is protected by her limitations,
like a tortoise. She lives within them quite secure and happy and
content. How determined you are to be sorry for her!'

Mr. Tottenham looked at the end of this lively exchange as though he
sought for a polite way of conveying to me that I rather was the
limited person. He looked as if he wished he could say things. The
first of them would be, I saw, that he had quite a different
conception of Cecily, that it was illuminated by many trifles,
nuances of feeling and expression, which he had noticed in his talks
with her whenever they had skirted the subject of her adoption by
her mother. He knew her, he was longing to say, better than I did;
when it would have been natural to reply that one could not hope to
compete in such a direction with an intelligent young man, and we
should at once have been upon delicate and difficult ground. So it