“I know the deceit of my own heart,” Mrs Stumfold would say.
“Of course you do, Mrs Stumfold,” the coachmaker’s wife replied. “It is dreadful deceitful, no doubt. Where’s the heart that ain’t? But there’s a difference in hearts. Your deceit isn’t hard like most of ’em. You know it, Mrs Stumfold, and wrestle with it, and get your foot on the neck of it, so that, as one may say, it’s always being killed and got the better of.”
During these months Miss Mackenzie learned to value at a very low rate the rank of the Stumfoldian circle into which she had been admitted. She argued the matter with herself, saying that the coachbuilder’s wife and others were not ladies. In a general way she was, no doubt, bound to assume them to be ladies; but she taught herself to think that such ladyhood was not
