"Remember Miss Tennant is present." But she had got beyond the stage when the presence of a third person, even that of an absolute stranger, could be depended upon to exercise any restraining effect.
"Well, since Miss Tenant's going to live here, the sooner she knows how things stand the better! She won't be here long without seeing how I'm treated"-- her voice rising hysterically--"set on one side, and denied even the few small pleasures my health permits----" She broke off in a storm of angry weeping, and Sara retreated hastily from the room, leaving husband and wife alone together.
She had barely regained the shabby sitting-room when the front door opened and closed with a bang, and a gay voice could be heard calling-- "Jane! Jane! Come here, my pretty Jane! I've brought home some shrimps for tea!" "Hold your noise, Miss Molly, now do!" Sara could hear Jane's admonitory whisper, and there followed a murmured colloquy, punctuated by exclamations and gusts of young laughter, calling forth renewed remonstrance from Jane, and then the door of the room was flung open, and Molly Selwyn sailed in and overwhelmed Sara with apologies for her reception, or rather, for the lack of it.

She was quite charming in her penitence, waving dimpled, deprecating hands, and appealing to Sara with a pair of liquid, disarming, golden-brown eyes that earned her forgiveness on the spot.
She was a statuesque young creature, compact of large, soft, gracious curves and swaying movements--with her nimbus of pale golden hair, and curiously floating, undulating walk, rather reminding one of a stray goddess.

Always untidy with hooks lacking at important junctures, and the trimmings of her hats usually pinned on with a casualness that occasionally resulted in their deserting the hat altogether, she could still never be other than delightful and irresistibly desirable to look upon.
Her red, curving mouth of a child, cleft chin, and dimpled, tapering hands all promised a certain yieldingness of disposition--a tendency to take always the line of least resistance--but it was a charming, appealing kind of frailty which most people--the sterner sex, certainly--would be very ready to condone.
It is a wonderful thing to be young.

Molly poured herself out a cup of hideously stewed tea and drank it joyously to an accompaniment of shrimps and bread-and-butter, and when Sara uttered a mild protest, she only laughed and declared that it was a wholesome and digestible diet compared with some of the "studio teas" perpetrated by the artists' colony at Oldhampton, of which she was a member.
She chattered away gaily to Sara, giving her vivacious thumb-nail portraits of her future neighbours--the people Selwyn had described as being "much nicer than ourselves." "The Herricks and Audrey Maynard are our most intimate friends--I'm sure you'll adore them.

Mrs.Maynard is a widow, and if she weren't so frightfully rich, Monkshaven would be perennially shocked at her.