Perhaps it was her unconstrained
naturalness. In walking, sitting, standing--whatever she did--her
movements and attitudes were not impeded or unduly masked by artificial
restrictions. I should not have called her profound, but what she said
upon the commonest subjects was interesting, because it was so entirely
her own. If she disliked a neighbour, she almost always disliked her
for a reason which we saw, directly it was pointed out to us, to be
just, but it was generally one which had not been given before. Her
talk upon matters externally trivial was thus much more to me than many
discourses upon the most important topics. On moral questions she
expressed herself without any regard to prejudices. She did not
controvert the authenticity of the ordinary standards, but nevertheless
behaved as if she herself were her only law. The people in R., her
little native borough, considered her to be dangerous, and I myself was
once or twice weak enough to wonder that she held on a straight course
with so little help from authority, forgetting that its support, in so
far as it possesses any vital strength, is derived from the same
internal source which supplied strength to her.
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