I'm a poor creature, quite ordinary and grubby; that's all,' said Miss Buchanan.
They said nothing more of it then, beyond Althea's murmur of now inarticulate protest; but the episode probably remained in Miss Buchanan's memory as something rather puzzling as well as rather pitiful, this demonstration of a feeling so entirely unexpected that she had not known what to do with it.
If, in these graver matters, she distressed Althea, in lesser ones she was continually, if not distressing her, at all events calling upon her, in complete unconsciousness, for readjustments of focus that were sometimes, in their lesser way, painful too.

When she asserted that she was not musical, Althea almost suspected her of saying it in order to evade her own descriptions of experiences at Bayreuth.

Pleasantly as she might listen, it was sometimes, Althea had discovered, with a restive air masked by a pervasive vagueness; this vagueness usually drifted over her when Althea described experiences of an intellectual or aesthetic nature.

It could be no question of evasion, however, when, in answer to a question of Althea's, she said that she hated Paris.

Since girlhood Althea had accepted Paris as the final stage in a civilised being's education: the Theatre Francais, the lectures at the Sorbonne, the Louvre and the Cluny, and, for a later age, Anatole France--it seemed almost barbarous to say that one hated the splendid city that clothed, as did no other place in the world, one's body and one's mind.