Confound their thick-skinned charitable souls, what do they know of how a sensitive woman suffers?
Forgive me, Lady Barbara--I get hot over this." He was silent; then seeing her eyes fixed on him, went on: "Her mother died when she was born, her father soon after her marriage.

She's enough money of her own, luckily, to live on quietly.

As for him, he changed his parish and runs one somewhere in the Midlands.
One's sorry for the poor devil, too, of course! They never see each other; and, so far as I know, they don't correspond.

That, Lady Barbara, is the simple history." Barbara, said, "Thank you," and turned away; and he heard her mutter: "What a shame!" But he could not tell whether it was Mrs.Noel's fate, or the husband's fate, or the thought of Miltoun that had moved her to those words.
She puzzled him by her self-possession, so almost hard, her way of refusing to show feeling.' Yet what a woman she would make if the drying curse of high-caste life were not allowed to stereotype and shrivel her! If enthusiasm were suffered to penetrate and fertilize her soul! She reminded him of a great tawny lily.

He had a vision of her, as that flower, floating, freed of roots and the mould of its cultivated soil, in the liberty of the impartial air.