You know very well, Eve, that you always talk in that way.

Of course, I knew that there must be people of a different kind, but--there now, you're making me confused, and I don't know what I meant to say." She was a thin-faced, but rather pretty girl, with auburn hair.
Belonging to a class which, especially in its women, has little intelligence to boast of, she yet redeemed herself from the charge of commonness by a certain vivacity of feature and an agreeable suggestion of good feeling in her would-be frank but nervous manner.

Hilliard laughed merrily at the vision in her mind of "great, rough, sooty men." "I'm sorry to disappoint you, Miss Ringrose." "No, but really--what sort of a place is Dudley?
Is it true that they call it the Black Country ?" "Let us walk about," interposed Eve.

"Mr.Hilliard will tell you all he can about the Black Country." She moved on, and they rambled aimlessly; among cigar-smoking clerks and shopmen, each with the female of his kind in wondrous hat and drapery; among domestic groups from the middle-class suburbs, and from regions of the artisan; among the frankly rowdy and the solemnly superior; here and there a man in evening dress, generally conscious of his white tie and starched shirt, and a sprinkling of unattached young women with roving eyes.

Hilliard, excited by the success of his advances, and by companionship after long solitude, became very unlike himself, talking and jesting freely.