How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
"It's very queer," [Mary] said. "Ben Weatherstaff said there was no door and there is no door. But there must have been one ten years ago, because Mr. Craven buried the key."
This gave her so much to think of that she began to be quite interested and feel that she was not sorry that she had come to Misselthwaite Manor. In India she had always felt hot and too languid to care much about anything. The fact was that the fresh wind from the moor had begun to blow the cobwebs out of her young brain and to waken her up a little. (5.21-2)
Again, the narrator is strongly implying that there is something unhealthy about the land of India. The heat of India made Mary too "languid" (which means slow and relaxed) to care about stuff—it's only now that she's in Yorkshire that the "fresh wind from the moor" is stirring her blood and making her active and interested in things around her. In The Secret Garden, it appears that England is literally better for people than India, which is (obviously) a strongly biased point of view.
Quote #5
The time had come when Mary had forgotten to resent Martha's familiar talk. She had even begun to find it interesting and to be sorry when she stopped or went away. The stories she had been told by her Ayah when she lived in India had been quite unlike those Martha had to tell about the moorland cottage which held fourteen people who lived in four little rooms and never had quite enough to eat. The children seemed to tumble about and amuse themselves like a litter of rough, good-natured collie puppies. Mary was most attracted by the mother and Dickon. When Martha told stories of what "mother" said or did they always sounded comfortable. (6.3)
Mary admires the stories of the Sowerby family, since she seems to find their lives quite quaint and rustic and even adorable ("rough, good-nature collie puppies"… seriously?). But the economic reality that they live with—fourteen people in four rooms—sounds brutal to us. The way that this novel romanticizes the life of poor people in rural England seems a little messed up to us.
Quote #6
"I thought perhaps it always rained or looked dark in England," Mary said.
"Eh! no!" said Martha, sitting up on her heels among her black lead brushes. "Nowt o' th' soart!"
"What does that mean?" asked Mary seriously. In India the natives spoke different dialects which only a few people understood, so she was not surprised when Martha used words she did not know.
Martha laughed as she had done the first morning.
"There now," she said. "I've talked broad Yorkshire again like Mrs. Medlock said I mustn't. 'Nowt o' th' soart' means 'nothin'-of-the-sort,'" slowly and carefully, "but it takes so long to say it." (7.5-9)
We're glad to know that Mary sometimes has as much trouble with Martha's thick Yorkshire accent as we do. Mary's comparison of Martha's "dialects which only a few people understood" in India with Martha's Yorkshire English is intriguing—it suggests that Martha's accent (and Dickon's, of course) is included in the novel to add a touch of the exotic and of local color to the book, something like Huck Finn's exaggerated accent in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.