She was only nineteen, but she looked at men and women with those discerning grey eyes, in which there seemed to lurk a quiet light like the light of stars, and saw right through them.

She was woman enough--despite the apparent inconsequence of the schoolroom, which still lent a vagueness to her thoughts and movements--to fall an easy victim to the appeal of helplessness.

Years, it would appear, are of no account in certain feminine instincts.

Miriam had probably been woman enough at ten years of age to fly to the rescue of the helpless.
She did not live permanently at the rectory, but visited her mother from time to time, either in England, or at one of the foreign resorts of idle people.

But the visits, as years went by, became shorter and rarer.
At twenty-one Miriam came into a small fortune of her own, left by her father in the hands of executors, one of whom was that John Turner, the Paris banker, who had given Dormer Colville a letter of introduction to Septimus Marvin.