But
one and all, whether they likes it or not, owns a woman's the better for
bein' dressed in the fashion. What do grieve me to my insidest heart, it
is your bonnet. What a bonnet that was lying beside her dear round arm
in the po'trait, and her finger up making a dimple in her cheek, as
if she was thinking of us in a sorrowful way. That's the arts o' being
lady-like--look sad-like. How could we get a bonnet for you?"

"My own must do," said Rhoda.

"Yes, and you to look like lady and servant-gal a-goin' out for an
airin'; and she to feel it! Pretty, that'd be!"

"She won't be ashamed of me," Rhoda faltered; and then hummed a little
tune, and said firmly--"It's no use my trying to look like what I'm
not."

"No, truly;" Mrs. Sumfit assented. "But it's your bein' behind the
fashions what hurt me. As well you might be an old thing like me,
for any pleasant looks you'll git. Now, the country--you're like in a
coalhole for the matter o' that. While London, my dear, its pavement
and gutter, and omnibus traffic; and if you're not in the fashion,
the little wicked boys of the streets themselves 'll let you know it;
they've got such eyes for fashions, they have. And I don't want my
Dahly's sister to be laughed at, and called 'coal-scuttle,' as happened
to me, my dear, believe it or not--and shoved aside, and said to--'Who
are you?' For she reely is nice-looking. Your uncle Anthony and Mr.
Robert agreed upon that."

Rhoda coloured, and said, after a time, "It would please me if people
didn't speak about my looks."

The looking-glass probably told her no more than that she was nice to
the eye, but a young man who sees anything should not see like a mirror,
and a girl's instinct whispers to her, that her image has not been taken
to heart when she is accurately and impartially described by him.

The key to Rhoda at this period was a desire to be made warm with praise
of her person. She beheld her face at times, and shivered. The face was
so strange with its dark thick eyebrows, and peculiarly straight-gazing
brown eyes; the level long red under-lip and curved upper; and the chin
and nose, so unlike Dahlia's, whose nose was, after a little dip from
the forehead, one soft line to its extremity, and whose chin seemed
shaped to a cup. Rhoda's outlines were harder. There was a suspicion of
a heavenward turn to her nose, and of squareness to her chin. Her face,
when studied, inspired in its owner's mind a doubt of her being even