As if her instinct were to escape to something brightly coloured and impersonal, which she could hold in her hands, she went into the house and returned with her embroidery.

But he was not interested in her embroidery; he did not even look at it.
"About Miss Vinrace," he began,--"oh, look here, do let's be St.John and Helen, and Rachel and Terence--what's she like?
Does she reason, does she feel, or is she merely a kind of footstool ?" "Oh no," said Helen, with great decision.

From her observations at tea she was inclined to doubt whether Hirst was the person to educate Rachel.

She had gradually come to be interested in her niece, and fond of her; she disliked some things about her very much, she was amused by others; but she felt her, on the whole, a live if unformed human being, experimental, and not always fortunate in her experiments, but with powers of some kind, and a capacity for feeling.

Somewhere in the depths of her, too, she was bound to Rachel by the indestructible if inexplicable ties of sex.