“Do you know,” she said, nodding confidentially towards him, “that I believe that is just the reason why I feel as if we were already friends? All my life I have had the value of birth and rank exaggerated to me. I have been taught to consider myself made of too fine a stuff to associate with any one in the neighborhood. I have never been allowed to play with other children, and when I was a baby child my nurses were constantly changed lest I should get too fond of any one so low and common as a nurse. I have been given the ‘Peerage,’ and the ‘County Families of England,’ and ‘Tales of Aristocratic Families,’ and ‘Legends of Ancestral Houses,’ and similar books, to amuse myself with ever since I could read; my German master was a decayed baron, and my French tutor the son of a marquis. I have always been forbidden to speak to the servants, except to give orders, and they also are very frequently changed. This is particularly so in the case of the lady’s maid who waits upon mamma and me; she never remains longer than a year, usually only a few months, just long enough to learn our ways and suit us. And do you know what the consequence of all this has been? As soon as I could be free from the presence of my nursery-governess--a very stiff person of over fifty, who could not forget she had once been in a duke’s family--I used to run away to my great, bare nursery, and dressing my dolls in rags, would pretend they were peasants, and hop-pickers, and beggars. And especially,” she added, her face lighting up with a mischievous gleam, “I loved making my dolls into poachers and tramps, and, best of all, gypsies. This was sheer naughtiness, I know, because Margaret had once told me that Sir Philip particularly detested gypsies, and that I was never on any account to mention them before him. I used to get up a little play in which a gypsy was unjustly accused of stealing and tried for it before my father, who was represented by a black-faced doll in a red coat. My father would try the gypsy and condemn him to be hanged, and then, just as the sentence was being carried out, a gallant young gentleman doll would come riding up on the shaft of an old wheelbarrow and cut him down. There was no game I enjoyed playing so much as that.”