is on the whole less important to us.

No eyelashes could be more beautiful than Hetty's; and now, while she
walks with her pigeon-like stateliness along the room and looks down on
her shoulders bordered by the old black lace, the dark fringe shows to
perfection on her pink cheek. They are but dim ill-defined pictures that
her narrow bit of an imagination can make of the future; but of every
picture she is the central figure in fine clothes; Captain Donnithorne
is very close to her, putting his arm round her, perhaps kissing her,
and everybody else is admiring and envying her--especially Mary Burge,
whose new print dress looks very contemptible by the side of Hetty's
resplendent toilette. Does any sweet or sad memory mingle with this
dream of the future--any loving thought of her second parents--of the
children she had helped to tend--of any youthful companion, any pet
animal, any relic of her own childhood even? Not one. There are some
plants that have hardly any roots: you may tear them from their native
nook of rock or wall, and just lay them over your ornamental flower-pot,
and they blossom none the worse. Hetty could have cast all her past life
behind her and never cared to be reminded of it again. I think she had
no feeling at all towards the old house, and did not like the Jacob's
Ladder and the long row of hollyhocks in the garden better than other
flowers--perhaps not so well. It was wonderful how little she seemed to
care about waiting on her uncle, who had been a good father to her--she
hardly ever remembered to reach him his pipe at the right time without
being told, unless a visitor happened to be there, who would have a
better opportunity of seeing her as she walked across the hearth. Hetty
did not understand how anybody could be very fond of middle-aged people.
And as for those tiresome children, Marty and Tommy and Totty, they had
been the very nuisance of her life--as bad as buzzing insects that will
come teasing you on a hot day when you want to be quiet. Marty, the
eldest, was a baby when she first came to the farm, for the children
born before him had died, and so Hetty had had them all three, one after
the other, toddling by her side in the meadow, or playing about her on
wet days in the half-empty rooms of the large old house. The boys were
out of hand now, but Totty was still a day-long plague, worse than
either of the others had been, because there was more fuss made about
her. And there was no en