You know I never told mother why we couldn't have her to live with us.

I never told her anything.

I simply made excuses." "That was all right, wasn't it ?" He was plainly nervous.
"At the time I thought I couldn't do differently, but now--" She gave him the letter, and while he unfolded it awkwardly, she watched him anxiously and yet without interrupting his reading.

Beyond the simple facts, she had told him nothing, and it was characteristic of her that she did not embellish these facts with picturesque phrases.

She herself was so insensible to the appeal of rhetoric that she hardly thought of it as likely to influence anybody.