It was just for this difference that, if she was to be liked at all, she wanted to be liked, and if that was not the source of Mr.Mudge's admiration, she asked herself what on earth _could_ be?
She was not different only at one point, she was different all round; unless perhaps indeed in being practically human, which her mind just barely recognised that he also was.

She would have made tremendous concessions in other quarters: there was no limit for instance to those she would have made to Captain Everard; but what I have named was the most she was prepared to do for Mr.Mudge.

It was because _he_ was different that, in the oddest way, she liked as well as deplored him; which was after all a proof that the disparity, should they frankly recognise it, wouldn't necessarily be fatal.

She felt that, oleaginous--too oleaginous--as he was, he was somehow comparatively primitive: she had once, during the portion of his time at Cocker's that had overlapped her own, seen him collar a drunken soldier, a big violent man who, having come in with a mate to get a postal-order cashed, had made a grab at the money before his friend could reach it and had so determined, among the hams and cheeses and the lodgers from Thrupp's, immediate and alarming reprisals, a scene of scandal and consternation.

Mr.Buckton and the counter-clerk had crouched within the cage, but Mr.Mudge had, with a very quiet but very quick step round the counter, an air of masterful authority she shouldn't soon forget, triumphantly interposed in the scrimmage, parted the combatants and shaken the delinquent in his skin.