and then Sarah would return slowly to her seat, her gaze aloof, cynical, remote.
She would carefully explain to Hortense the reason of the uproar.

She had done nothing--her conscience was clear.

These silly little idiots.
She would break into French, culled elaborately from Hortense, would end disdainfully--"mais, voil,"-- very old for her age.
Hortense was vicious, selfish, crude in her pursuit of pleasure, entirely unscrupulous, but, as the days passed, she was, in spite of herself, conscious of some half-acknowledged, half-decided terror of Sarah's possibilities.
The child was eight years old.

She was capable of anything; in her remote avoidance of any passion, any regret, any anticipated pleasure, any spontaneity, she was inhuman.

Hortense thought that she detected in the chit's mother something of her own fear.
III There used to come to the gardens a little fat red-faced girl called Mary Kitson, the child of simple and ingenuous parents (her father was a writer of stories of adventure for boys' papers); she was herself simple-minded, lethargic, unadventurous, and happily stupid.