Page:Far from the Maddening Girls.djvu/123

 wise. Moreover, the manner of her discourse was disjointed to the last degree. Sequence of thought with her went round and round like a squirrel in a wheel and with about as definite results. She started, she continued, but she never arrived.

“I once had a niece, Mr. Sands,” she would say, for example, “that is, she wasn’t exactly my niece — or, yes, you might call her a niece, I suppose. She was my brother-in-law’s child by his first wife — a very intelligent girl, she was — that is, she was hardly a girl — she was twenty — well, you might say a girl — she wasn’t quite twenty — but she was a very intelligent girl — girl is hardly the word, because she seemed older — at all events, I always thought of her as my niece — in fact, she might just as well have been — though calling her my niece didn’t make her so — but if she had been I couldn’t have thought more of her — I had a niece who didn’t seem half so much so as she did — though she was very intelligent, too —