They were not drastic and relegating, like those of Lady Blair's; they did not make her feel unsafe as Lady Blair's had done; they merely made her feel that her world was very narrow and she herself rather ingenuous.
Helen herself seemed unaware of standards, and had certainly never experienced any of Althea's anxieties.

She had always been safe, partly, Althea had perceived, because she had been born safe, but, in the main, because she was quite indifferent to safety.

And with this indifference and this security went the further fact that she had, probably, never been ingenuous.

With all her admiration, her affection for her new friend, this sense of the change that she was working in her life sometimes made Althea a little afraid of her, and sometimes a little indignant.

She, herself, was perfectly safe in America, and when she felt indignant she asked herself what Helen Buchanan would have done had she been turned into a strange continent with hardly any other guides than the memory of a lorgnette and a Baedeker.
It was when she was bound to answer this question, and to recognise that in such circumstances Miss Buchanan would have gone her way, entirely unperturbed, and entirely sure of her own preferences, that Althea felt afraid of her.