Whereupon the whole world took on a new significance and splendour, as it needs must when nascent talent claims its own, asserts its dawning right to dominion and to freedom.
And there the pathos of her father's position touched her nearly.

For wasn't it a little cruel this remarkable gift of his should so long have lain dormant, unsuspected by his friends, unknown to the reading public, only to disclose itself, and that by the merest hazard, as a last resource ?--It did not seem fair that he had not earlier found and enjoyed his literary birthright.
Damaris propounded this view to Colonel Carteret with some heat.

But he smilingly discounted her fondly indignant lament.
"Better late than never anyhow, my dear witch," he said.

"And just picture the satisfaction of this brilliant rally when, as we'd reason to believe, he himself reckoned the game was up! Oh! there are points about a tardy harvest such as this, by no means to be despised.

Thrice blessed the man who, like your father, finding such a harvest, also finds it to be of a sort he can without scruple reap." Of which cryptic utterance Damaris, at the time, could--to quote her own phrase--"make no sense!"-- Nor could she make sense of it, now, when counting her blessings, she rested, in happy idleness, upon the faded scarlet cushions of the window-seat.
She remembered the occasion quite well on which Carteret thus expressed himself one afternoon, during their stay in Paris, on the southward journey.