She knew very little indeed of the class to which by birth she belonged; great houses and great people were strange to her.

She brought her artist's and student's eyes to look at them with; she was determined not to be dazzled or taken in by them.

At the same time, as she glanced every now and then round the splendid room in which they sat, with its Tudor ceiling, its fine pictures, its combination of every luxury with every refinement, she was distinctly conscious of a certain thrill, a romantic drawing towards the stateliness and power which it all implied, together with a proud and careless sense of equality, of kinship so to speak, which she made light of, but would not in reality have been without for the world.
In birth and blood she had nothing to yield to the Raeburns--so her mother assured her.

If things were to be vulgarly measured, this fact too must come in.

But they should not be vulgarly measured.