I should think it would be more trying to the nerves to live where every one went tiptoe." But no manner of coldness could check Miss Joan's propensity for belittling her benefactress.

And I remember that once she had been tittle-tattling as usual, and had said something more indefensible than usual of her benefactress, when looking up suddenly we found Miss Champion in the room.
"Let the child love me, Joan," she said, with the nearest approach to sharpness I ever heard in her speech; but when Miss Joan burst into tears she stooped and shook up her pillows and soothed her in a way that was tender without being attached, and afterwards she said something to me which was a dark saying since I did not know the secret between her and Miss Joan.
"One must needs be good to anything that has hurt one so much," she said.
I had always known vaguely that there was something between Mary Champion and my Uncle Luke, and that explained to some extent her influence with my grandparents.

She brought into their shut-up lives, indeed, the open air and the ways of other folk, without which I think we should have all grown too strange and odd and a century at least behind our time.

Indeed, even with her, I think we were so much out of date.
"The child grows more and more like a plant which has lived without the light," she said one day of me to my grandmother.
"It is Bawn's nature to look pale," my grandmother said, looking at me in an alarmed way.
"It is her nature to look pale perhaps," my godmother said, while I fidgeted at hearing myself discussed, "but she ought to look no paler than this apple-blossom I am wearing, which at all events dreams of rose-colour.

You keep her too much penned.