However, I don't believe I really do care about pictures.

You see, altogether I've had no education.' Her education, indeed, contrasted with Althea's well-ordered and elaborate progression, had been lamentable--a mere succession of incompetent governesses.

Yet, on pressing her researches, Althea, though finding almost unbelievable voids, felt, more than anything else, tastes sharp and fine that seemed to cut into her own tastes and show her suddenly that she did not really like what she had thought she liked, or that she liked what she had hardly before been aware of.

All that Helen could be brought to define was that she liked looking at things in the country: at birds, clouds, and flowers; but though striking Althea as a creature strangely untouched and unmoulded, she struck her yet more strongly as beautifully definite.

She marvelled at her indifference to her own shortcomings, and she marvelled at the strength of personality that could so dispense with other people's furnishings.
Among the things that Helen made her see, freshly and perturbingly, was the sheaf of friends in England of whom she had thought with such security when Miss Robinson had spoken of the London _salon_.
Althea had been trained in a school of severe social caution.