Wistful and elfish, sitting like Puck on a toadstool, she might have slipped out of some mossy corner of the woods to taste the breeze and speculate about life.
She wore a butter-colored sport shirt wide open at the neck and brown cord riding breeches and puttees.

Slight and small boned and rather thin she could easily have passed for a delicate boy or, except for something at the back of her eyes that showed that she had not always lived among trees, for Peter Pan's brother of whom the world had never heard.
Few people would have recognized in this spring maid the Tootles of Broadway and that rabbit warren in West Forty-sixth Street.

The dew of the country had washed her face and lips, and the choir voices of Martin's big cathedral had put peace and gentleness into her expression.
She ran her eyes with frank admiration over the unself-consciously patrician Joan in her immaculate town clothes and let them rest finally on a face that seemed to her to be the most attractive that she had ever seen, for all that its expression made her want to scramble to her feet and take to her heels.

But she controlled herself and sat tight, summoned her native impertinence to the rescue and gave a friendly nod.
After all, it was a free country.

There were no princesses knocking about.
"You don't look as if you were a pal of squirrels," she said.
Joan's resentment at the unexpected presence of this interloper only lasted a moment.