She looked exactly like a governess who had put the children to bed; and her manner to me was just the neutral manner of a governess.

To her husband, too, for that matter.
Fyne told her that I was fully informed.

Not a muscle of her ruddy smooth handsome face moved.

She had schooled herself into that sort of thing.

Having seen two successive wives of the delicate poet chivied and worried into their graves, she had adopted that cool, detached manner to meet her gifted father's outbreaks of selfish temper.