At any rate, she relinquished it without a second thought.
Presently Lady Newhaven dried her eyes and turned impulsively towards
her.
The strata of impulsiveness and conventional feeling were always so
mixed up after one of these emotional upheavals that it was difficult to
guess which would come uppermost. Sometimes fragments of both appeared
on the surface together.
"I loved you from the first moment I saw you," she said. "I don't take
fancies to people, you know. I am not that kind of person. I am very
difficult to please, and I never speak of what concerns myself. I am
_most_ reserved. I dare say you have noticed how reserved I am. I live
in my shell. But directly I saw you I felt I could talk to you. I said
to myself, 'I will make a friend of that girl.' Although I always feel a
married woman is so differently placed from a girl. A girl only thinks
of herself. I am not saying this the least unkindly, but, of course, it
is so. Now a married woman has to consider her husband and family in all
she says and does. How will it affect _them?_ That is what I so often
say to myself, and then my lips are sealed. But, of course, being
unmarried, you would not understand that feeling."
Rachel did not answer. She was inured to this time-honored
conversational opening.
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