away her heart from her home. He had once picked up one of them where
she had left it; but the high-flown style seemed as senseless to him as
the words of an incantation, and he had flung it down more bewildered
than ever. He thought there must be some strange difference between
their minds when she could delight in what seemed so uncanny to him,
and he gazed at her, reading by the lamp-light, as over a great gulf.
Even her hands holding the book made him uneasy; for since she had
grown careful of them, they were like no hands he had ever seen on any
of his kith and kin. The fingers were long and white, and the nails
were shaped like an almond, and though the hands lacked delicacy at the
articulations, they almost made Matchin reverence his daughter as his
superior, as he looked at his own.

One evening, irritated by the silence and his own thoughts, he cried
out with a sudden suspicion:

"Where do you git all them books, and what do they cost?"

She turned her fine eyes slowly upon him and said:

"I get them from the public library, and they cost nothing."

He felt deeply humiliated that he should have made a blunder so
ridiculous and so unnecessary.

After she had left the school--where she was graduated as near as
possible to the foot of the class--she was almost alone in the world.
She rarely visited her sister, for the penury of the Wixham household
grated upon her nerves, and she was not polite enough to repress her
disgust at the affectionate demonstrations of the Wixham babies.