As I look back at this phase they seem to me to have pervaded my life not a little.

I have a vision of them as most of the time in my studio, seated against the wall on an old velvet bench to be out of the way, and resembling the while a pair of patient courtiers in a royal antechamber.

I'm convinced that during the coldest weeks of the winter they held their ground because it saved them fire.
Their newness was losing its gloss, and it was impossible not to feel them objects of charity.

Whenever Miss Churm arrived they went away, and after I was fairly launched in "Rutland Ramsay" Miss Churm arrived pretty often.

They managed to express to me tacitly that they supposed I wanted her for the low life of the book, and I let them suppose it, since they had attempted to study the work--it was lying about the studio--without discovering that it dealt only with the highest circles.
They had dipped into the most brilliant of our novelists without deciphering many passages.