‘Ay, there it is, there it is!’ Stephen interrupted with bitterness.  ’She’s got beyond us—­beyond me as well as you.  And she isn’t what I meant her to be, very far from it.  I haven’t brought them up as I wished.  I don’t know—­I’m sure I don’t know why.  It was in own hands.  When they were little children, I said to myself:  hey shall grow up plain, good, honest girl and boy.  I said that I wouldn’t educate them very much; I saw little good that came of it, in our rank of life.  I meant them to be simple-minded.  I hoped Nancy would marry a plain countryman, like the men I used to know when I was a boy; a farmer, or something of that kind.  But see how it’s come about.  It wasn’t that I altered my mind about what was best.  But I seemed to have no choice.  For one thing, I made more money at business than I had expected, and so—­and so it seemed that they ought to be educated above me and mine.  There was my mother, did a better woman ever live?  She had no education but that of home.  She could have brought up Nancy in the good, old-fashioned way, if I had let her.  I wish I had, yes, I wish I had.’

‘I don’t think you could have felt satisfied,’ said the listener, with intelligent sympathy.

‘Why not?  If she had been as good and useful a woman as you are—­’

’Ah, you mustn’t think in that way, Mr. Lord.  I was born and bred to service.  Your daughter had a mind given her at her birth, that would never have been content with humble things.  She was meant for education and a higher place.’

’What higher place is there for her?  She thinks herself too good for the life she leads here, and yet I don’t believe she’ll ever find a place among people of a higher class.  She has told me herself it’s my fault.  She says I ought to have had a big house for her, so that she might make friends among the rich.  Perhaps she’s right.  I have made her neither one thing nor another.  Mary, if I had never come to London, I might have lived happily.  My place was away there, in the old home.  I’ve known that for many a year.  I’ve thought:  wait till I’ve made a little more money, and I’ll go back.  But it was never done; and now it looks to me as if I had spoilt the lives of my children, as well as my own.  I can’t trust Nancy, that’s the worst of it.  You don’t know what she did on Jubilee night.  She wasn’t with Mr. Barmby and the others—­Barmby told me about it; she pretended to lose them, and went off somewhere to meet a man she’s never spoken to me about.  Is that how a good girl would act?  I didn’t speak to her about it; what use?  Very likely she wouldn’t tell me the truth.  She takes it for granted I can’t understand her.  She thinks her education puts her above all plain folk and their ways—­ that’s it.’

Mary’s eyes had fallen, and she kept silence.