She settled herself back more easily in her chair. "Well, I believe I am," she said. "I’ve tried to make myself. I love him dearly, and I’d do anything for his sake. It’s been right to bring him up quietly here. She’s been right there. I’ll say that for her, though I hate her." "You don’t really hate her," said Mrs. Grant; "and I don’t think you’ve any reason to. What she has done has been for Harry’s sake too." "It has been for the sake of the Brent family. Her son married beneath him—so she says—though I’d have made him a good wife, and though I loved him I knew he wasn’t all he might have been. She’s going to see that Harry doesn’t run any risk of doing the same. Well, I’m with her there. I don’t want Harry to be mixed up with what I come from. But there’s nothing nasty about it. It’s only that we weren’t up in the world. Do you know I haven’t so much as set eyes on my own people since Harry was born? Why shouldn’t I? I’m flesh and blood. My father died since I came here, and mother’s getting on. She was nearly fifty when I was married." "Do you mean that Lady Brent——?" "Oh, it was me too. I said that I’d give them up when I came here. The fact is that I wasn’t best pleased with them at that time. I’d promised Harry—my husband, I mean; they’re all called Harry—not to say I was married till he came home. Poor boy, he never did come home, but before that—well, they said things—at least, mother did—that made me furious. I kept my promise to him till I heard he’d been killed, poor boy. Then I let them have it. Perhaps I hadn’t learnt quite so many manners then as I have since, though I was always considered refined by the other girls in the company. Anyhow, it ended in my saying I never wanted to see them again, and we never even wrote till poor father died. Still, I’ve forgiven them now, it’s so long ago, and I cried when father died, and wrote to mother. I was very fond of father. He used to take me on his knee when I was little and read stories out of the Bible to me. He was a religious man, and didn’t like my going on the stage. Sometimes I wish I’d never gone. Emily, my next oldest sister, went into millinery and did well. She married long ago and has a boy nearly as old as Harry, though of course he’d be very different. Mother said she had a nice house out Hendon way, when she wrote, and three little girls, as well as a boy. I dare say I should have been much happier like that, though I shouldn’t have had Harry. But it couldn’t do Harry any harm now if I just went up and saw them sometimes. I needn’t even say I was going to see them or anything about them. Why shouldn’t I go to London for a week, as other ladies do, to see their dressmaker or something? I think it’s more London I want than mother, if you ask me. Oh, just to see the lights and the pavements, and the people jostling one another! I’m like famished for it."