form any opinion of life, and as her position became more difficult,
while the future did not grow more defined, she tried to think
connectedly about it all, and to reach some useful conclusion.

It was not easy. In her native city, living under the roof of people
who held a strong position in the society to which she belonged,
though they had not been born to it, she was as completely isolated as
if she had been suddenly taken away and set down amongst strangers in
Australia. She was as lonely as she could have been on a desert
island.

The Volterra couple were radically, constitutionally, congenitally
different from the men and women she had seen in her mother's house.
She could not have told exactly where the difference lay, for she was
too young, and perhaps too simple. She did not instinctively like
them, but she had never really felt any affection for her mother
either, and her own brother and sister had always repelled her. Her
mother had sometimes treated her like a toy, but more often as a
nuisance and a hindrance in life, to be kept out of the way as much,
as possible, and married off on the first opportunity. Yet Sabina knew
that far down in her nature there was a mysterious tie of some sort,
an intuition that often told her what her mother would say or do,
though she herself would have spoken and acted otherwise. She had felt
it even with her brother and sister, but she could not feel it at all
with the Baron or his wife. She never could guess what they might do
or say under the most ordinary circumstances, nor what things they
would like and dislike, nor how they would regard anything she said or
did; least of all could she understand why they were so anxious to
keep her with them.