I saw that he took me for a peasant girl and I was not minded to enlighten him.

I was going away; and perhaps before I came back he would be gone again on his travels, for I had always heard that he was wild and a rover and could not be persuaded to settle down and live at Damerstown although his father and mother were most anxious that he should.

My heartfelt desire at the moment was that I should never again see Richard Dawson's face, with its insolent and coarse good looks, as long as I lived.
"Yes, you took the shine out of the fine ladies that were with me that day," he went on, "fine a conceit as they have of themselves.

They were fine London ladies, my dear, the sort that play cards all night, and motor all day, and have no time to be God-fearing and loving like the women that went before them.

You didn't look at them ?" The speech struck me as oddly incongruous in parts of it, yet we had heard--about the one thing we had heard in his favour--that he was fond of his old mother, a good-natured, homely, kindly body, people said, who was rather unhappy among the Dawson riches, rather afraid of her granite-faced, beetling-browed husband.
"No, I didn't look at them," I said.
"And why not, pray ?" "I took no interest in them.