Even in that moment she did not forget that she knew her own mother, for she took the precaution to elicit a confirmatory letter from her mother's attorney, under guise of thanking him for the friendly interest he had "ever manifested" in the welfare of the Lansdales.
It occurred to me that Little Miss had been endowed, either by nature or experience, with a marked distrust of mere seemings.

The impression conveyed to me by her unenthusiastic though skilfully polite letter was of one who had formed the habit of doubting beyond her years.

These I judged to be twenty-eight or thereabouts, while her powers of restraint under provocation to believe savored of more years than even her mother could claim.

I had myself been compelled to note the value of negative views, save in that inner and lonely world where I abode of nights and Sundays; I, too, had proved the wisdom of much doubting as to actual, literal events; but Little Miss was making me think of myself as almost raw-and-twenty credulous.

In a lawyer's letter of formal conciseness, devoid of humanities, maintaining to the end an atmosphere of unemotional fact and figure that descended not even to conventional felicitations upon the result, I therefore acquainted Little Miss with the situation.