they had heard in her company

It was not, she owned to herself, that the society of the Fulmerchildren had roused in her any abstract passion for the humanyoung. She knew--had known since Nick's first kiss--how shewould love any child of his and hers; and she had cherished poorlittle Clarissa Vanderlyn with a shrinking and wistfulsolicitude. But in these rough young Fulmers she took apositive delight, and for reasons that were increasingly clearto her. It was because, in the first place, they were allintelligent; and because their intelligence had been fed only onthings worth caring for. However inadequate Grace Fulmer'sbringing-up of her increasing tribe had been, they had heard in her company nothing trivial or dull: good music, good books andgood talk had been their daily food, and if at times theystamped and roared and crashed about like children unblessed bysuch privileges, at others they shone with the light of poetryand spoke with the voice of wisdom. 　　That had been Susy's discovery: for the first time she wasamong awakening minds which had been wakened only to beauty. 　　>From their cramped and uncomfortable household Grace and NatFulmer had managed to keep out mean envies, vulgar admirations,shabby discontents; above all the din and confusion the greatimages of beauty had brooded, like those ancestral figures thatstood apart on their shelf in the poorest Roman households. 　　No, the task she had undertaken for want of a better gave Susyno sense of a missed vocation: "mothering" on a large scalewould never, she perceived, be her job. Rather it gave her, inodd ways, the sense of being herself mothered, of taking herfirst steps in the life of immaterial values which had begun toseem so much more substantial than any she had known. 　　On the day when she had gone to Grace Fulmer for counsel andcomfort she had little guessed that they would come to her inthis form. She had found her friend, more than ever distractedand yet buoyant, riding the large untidy waves of her life withthe splashed ease of an amphibian. Grace was probably the onlyperson among Susy's friends who could have understood why shecould not make up her mind to marry Altringham; but at themoment Grace was too much absorbed in her own problems to paymuch attention to her friend's, and, according to her wont, sheimmediately "unpacked" her difficulties.