She knows everything," said Jane, with the prickly sweetness of suffering virtue.
"But she's a young girl--young girls oughtn't to hear such things," argued Uncle Meriweather, feeling helplessly that something was wrong with the universe, and that, since it was different from anything he had ever known in the past, he was unable to cope with it.

Into his eyes, gentle and bloodshot above his fierce white moustache--the eyes of one who has never suffered the painful process of thinking things out, but has accepted his opinions as unquestioningly as he has accepted his religion or the cut of his clothes--there came the troubled look of one who is struggling against forces that he does not understand.

For Gabriella was serious.

There was not the slightest hope in the disturbed mind of Uncle Meriweather that she was anything but perfectly serious.
Caprice, being a womanly quality, was not without a certain charm for him.

He was quite used to it; he knew how to take it; he had been taught to recognize it from his childhood up.