“It is my fault that it comes upon you all at once. I never thought---- You were a very small child when I brought you away. You forgot them all, as was natural. I did not at first know how entirely a child forgets; and then--then it seemed a pity to disturb your mind, and perhaps set you longing for--what it was impossible for you to obtain.”
It surprised him a little that Frances did not breathe a syllable of reproach. She said nothing. In her imagination she was looking back over these years, wondering how it would have been had she known. Would life ever be the same, now that she did know? The world seemed to open up round her, so much greater, wider, more full than she had thought. She had not thought much on the subject. Life in Bordighera was more limited even than life in an English village. The fact that she did not belong to the people among whom she had spent all these years, made a difference; and her father’s recluse habits, the few people he cared to know, the stagnation of his life, made a greater difference still. Frances had scarcely felt it until that meeting with the Mannerings, which put so many vague ideas into her mind. A child does not naturally inquire into the circumstances which have surrounded it all its life. It was natural to her to live in this retired place, to see nobody, to make amusements and occupations for herself--to know no one more like herself than Tasie Durant. Had she even possessed any girl-friends living the natural life of youth, that might have inspired a question or two. But she knew no girls--except Tasie, whose girlhood was a sort of fossil, and who might almost have been the mother of Frances. She saw indeed the village girls, but it did not occur to her to compare herself with them. Familiar as she was with all their ways, she was still a _forestière_--one of the barbarous people, English, a word which explains every difference. Frances did not quite know in what the peculiarity and eccentricity of the English consisted; but she, too, recognised with all simplicity that, being English, she was different. Now it came suddenly to her mind that the difference was not anything generic and general, but that it was her own special circumstances that had been unlike all the rest. There had been a mother all the time; another girl, a sister, like herself. It made her brain whirl.