She had certain affections toward people and places; but they were not of a consuming sort.
As for us, our feelings, our sentiments, affections, etc., are fine and keen, delicate and many; what we call refined.

Why?
Because we get them as we get our old swords and gems and laces--from our grandsires, mothers, and all.

Refined they are--after centuries of refining.

But the feelings handed down to Clemence had come through ages of African savagery; through fires that do not refine, but that blunt and blast and blacken and char; starvation, gluttony, drunkenness, thirst, drowning, nakedness, dirt, fetichism, debauchery, slaughter, pestilence and the rest--she was their heiress; they left her the cinders of human feelings.

She remembered her mother.