She had no friends
quite of her own; she had not been brought up to have them, and it
would not have been easy in a house which two such persons as her
father and his mother divided between them. Her father disapproved
of crude intimacies, and all the intimacies of youth were crude. He
had married at five-and-twenty and could testify to such a truth.
Rose felt that she shared even Captain Jay with her grandmother; she
had seen what HE was worth. Moreover, she had spoken to him at that
last moment in Hill Street in a way which, taken with her former
refusal, made it impossible that he should come near her again. She
hoped he went to see his protectress: he could be a kind of
substitute and administer comfort.
It so happened, however, that the day after she threw Lady
Maresfield's invitation into the wastepaper basket she received a
visit from a certain Mrs. Donovan, whom she had occasionally seen in
Hill Street. She vaguely knew this lady for a busybody, but she was
in a situation which even busybodies might alleviate. Mrs. Donovan
was poor, but honest--so scrupulously honest that she was perpetually
returning visits she had never received. She was always clad in
weather-beaten sealskin, and had an odd air of being prepared for the
worst, which was borne out by her denying that she was Irish.
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