It seemed as if she meant that he should see all
she had been in that past, which still must be part of the present and
have its place in the future, however far away all that belonged to it
would be. She appeared to search her mind to find that which would
prejudice him against her. While speaking with slow scorn of the life
which she had lived as a Gipsy, yet she tried to make him understand,
too, that, in the days when she belonged to it, it all seemed natural to
her, and that its sordidness, its vagabondage did not produce repugnance
in her mind when she was part of it. Unwittingly she over-coloured the
picture, and he knew she did.
In spite of herself, however, some aspects of the old life called forth
pictures of happy Nature, of busy animal life of wood and glen and stream
and footpath which was exquisite in its way. She was in spirit at one
with the multitudinous world of nature among which so many men and women
lived, without seeing or knowing. It was all undesignedly a part of
herself, and she was one of a population in a universal nation whose
devout citizen she was. Sometimes, in response to an interjection from
Ingolby, deftly made, she told of some incident which revealed as great a
poetic as dramatic instinct.
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