But there you are! Explain it as you may, in this world the friendless, like the poor, are always a little suspect, as if honesty and delicacy were only possible to the privileged few.
"Why do you ask ?" she said after a time, raising her eyes suddenly to mine in an effect of candour which on the same principle (of the disinherited not being to be trusted) might have been judged equivocal.
"If you mean what right I have.

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" She move slightly a hand in a worn brown glove as much as to say she could not question anyone's right against such an outcast as herself.
I ought to have been moved perhaps; but I only noted the total absence of humility.

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