It's not like my mother, and I can't bear to think of her like that.

I tell you she's changed altogether," said Peter, and there were tears in his grey eyes.
John felt an odd sympathy for the boy; he recognized that though Peter's limitations were obvious, his anxiety was sincere.
Peter, too, had his ideals; if they were ideals conventional and out of date, that was hardly his fault.

John figured to himself very distinctly that imaginary mother whom Peter held sacred; the mother who stayed always at home, and parted her hair plainly, and said many prayers, and did much needlework; but who, nevertheless, was not, and never could be, the real Lady Mary, whom Peter did not know.

But it was a tender ideal in its way, though it belonged to that past into which so many tender and beautiful visions have faded.
The maiden of to-day still dreams of the knightly armour-clad heroes of the twelfth century; it is not her fault that she is presently glad to fall in love with a gentleman on the Stock Exchange, in a top hat and a frock coat.
"I have seen something of women of the world," said Peter, who had scarcely yet skimmed the bubbles from the surface of that society, whose depths he believed himself to have explored.

"I suppose that is what my mother wants to turn into, when she talks of London and Paris.
_My mother_! who has lived in the country all her life." "I suppose some women are worldly," said John, as gravely as possible, "and no doubt the shallow-hearted, the stupid, the selfish are to be found everywhere, and belonging to either sex; but, nevertheless, solid virtue and true kindness are to be met with among the dames of Mayfair as among the matrons of the country-side.