‘I now feel that, for weeks, the lessons must have been rather my own.’ – A teacher has to take the initiative in a lesson otherwise it will be taken from her or him. Just as the narrator allowed Flora to lead her about the house (an innocent diversion in that case), she now (much more dangerously) allows Miles to teach her.

‘ “I […] learned to be amused, and even amusing, and not to think for the morrow […]”’ – Given the narrator’s ‘small, smothered’ previous ‘life’, her interactions with Miles seem to provide her with her first real experience of the pleasures of human society. The language she uses – ‘space and air and freedom’; ‘the music of summer and all the mystery of nature’ – would not be surprising if used by a young wom