In any case she had an ample pocket in her dress.
This fairly full description of her is given not because she is the most important person in the story, but because the end of the story would have been entirely different had it not been for her; and because she herself was one of those who are so much the sport of circumstances or chance that they express the full meaning of the title of this story.
As a line beneath the title explains, the tale concerns a matrimonial deserter.

Certainly this girl had never deserted matrimony, though she had on more than one occasion avoided it; and there had been men mean and low enough to imagine they might allure her to the conditions of matrimony without its status.
As with her mother the advertisement of her appearance was wholly misleading.

A man had once said to her that "she looked too gay to be good," but in all essentials she was as good as she was gay, and indeed rather better.

Her mother had not kept boarders for seven years without getting some useful knowledge of the world, or without imparting useful knowledge; and there were men who, having paid their bills on demand, turned from her wiser if not better men.

Because they had pursued the old but inglorious profession of hunting tame things, Mrs.Tyndall Tynan had exacted compensation in one way or another--by extras, by occasional and deliberate omission of table luxuries, and by making them pay for their own mending, which she herself only did when her boarders behaved themselves well.