your gentle and feminine fosterage
This addition to the text seems motivated by a wish to make Margaret
Saville a less shadowy presence behind it. The implicit suggestion is that
she is sufficiently older than her brother to have cared for him when they
were orphaned, though, considering the twin facts that she has children in her
own family and Robert is now 28 years old, we must assume that the
difference in age would amount to something like a decade
(Walton 5). The added phrase also
emphasizes the role of feminine nurturer assumed by all the prominent
women of the novel.
