y with a deprecating,
ladylike smile--a plea of being too soft and bland for experience.

She took the refined, sentimental, tender view of the universe,
beginning with her own history and feelings. She believed in everything
high and pure, disinterested and orthodox, and even at the Hotel de la
Garonne was unconscious of the shabby or the ugly side of the world. She
never despaired: otherwise what would have been the use of being a
Neville-Nugent? Only not to have been one--that would have been
discouraging. She delighted in novels, poems, perversions,
misrepresentations, and evasions, and had a capacity for smooth,
superfluous falsification which made our young man think her sometimes
an amusing and sometimes a tedious inventor. But she wasn't dangerous
even if you believed her; she wasn't even a warning if you didn't. It
was harsh to call her a hypocrite, since you never could have resolved
her back into her character, there being no reverse at all to her
blazonry. She built in the air and was not less amiable than she
pretended, only that was a pretension too. She moved altogether in a
world of elegant fable and fancy, and Sherringham had to live there with
her for Miriam's sake, live there in sociable, vulgar assent and despite
his feeling it rather a low neighbourhood. He was at a loss how to take
what she said--she talked sweetly and discursively of so many
things--till he simply noted that he could only take it always for
untrue. When Miriam laughed at her he was rather disagreeably affected:
"dear mamma's fine stories" was a sufficiently cynical reference to the
immemorial infirmity of a parent. But when the girl backed her up, as
he phrased it to himself, he liked that even less.

Mrs. Rooth was very fond of a moral and had never lost her taste for
edification. She delighted in a beautiful character and was gratified to
find so many more than she had supposed represented in the contemporary
French drama. She never failed to direct Miriam's attention to them and
to remind her that there is nothing in life so grand as a sublime act,
above all when sublimely explained. Peter made much of the difference
between the mother and the daughter, thinking it singularly marked--the
way one took everything for the sense, or behaved as if she did, caring
only for the plot and the romance, the triumph or defeat of virtue and
the moral comfort of it all, and the way the other was alive but to the
manner and the art of it, th