Read "Humbug" by E.M. Delafield online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Lily formed and retained a very acute impression of the Bridgecrap atmosphere, during the three years that she spent there, but hardly a single personality in the place made any lasting effect upon her memory. Yet it was during those three years that a secret and shamed conviction slowly crystallized within her; they were all what she inwardly called Real Live People, and she herself was only a sham. However much she might try to be like everyone else, sooner or later they would find her out.
She could not have explained wherein lay the difference, but connected it vaguely with a mysterious undercurrent of romance that ran through her daily life, and of which no one must ever, ever know.