She gazed into the fire quietly, and without a trace of self-consciousness.

The hostility which she had divined in Mary's tone had completely disappeared, and she forgot that she had been upon the point of going.
"Well, I suppose I have," she said at length.

"And yet I sometimes think--" She paused; she did not know how to express what she meant.
"It came over me in the Tube the other day," she resumed, with a smile; "what is it that makes these people go one way rather than the other?
It's not love; it's not reason; I think it must be some idea.

Perhaps, Mary, our affections are the shadow of an idea.

Perhaps there isn't any such thing as affection in itself...." She spoke half-mockingly, asking her question, which she scarcely troubled to frame, not of Mary, or of any one in particular.
But the words seemed to Mary Datchet shallow, supercilious, cold-blooded, and cynical all in one.