[it's a good thing she's less impulsive and brash than she was as a girl, because a younger Cecelia would begin to go off on a tangent about full dialogues one can have with just a look or a gesture - you know, the way idiots do in poems and novels. Geddoe is spared this, and he has no idea how lucky he is; it would have shorn even more years off his long life.

as it stands, she can put on polite airs for the compliment:] The value of my knowledge is all relative, sir. To circumstance, to the moment...try as I might, I'm still no master of the workings of this place, so we are all of us responsible for our own mastery.

[even you, old man.]