Lady Winterbourne's old and delicate cheek had flushed.
"I'm sure it's sincere," she said with emphasis.

"Do you mean to say, Agneta, that one can't sympathise, in such an awful thing, with people of another class, as one would with one's own flesh and blood ?" Miss Raeburn winced.

She felt for a moment the pressure of a democratic world--a hated, formidable world--through her friend's question.

Then she stood to her guns.
"I dare say you'll think it sounds bad," she said stoutly; "but in my young days it would have been thought a piece of posing--of sentimentalism--something indecorous and unfitting--if a girl had put herself in such a position.

Marcella _ought_ to be absorbed in her marriage; that is the natural thing.