Miss Leaf said, decidedly "Second class; and then we can keep Elizabeth with us." Upon which Elizabeth's mouth melted into something between a quiver and a smile.
Soon it was all over, and the little house-hold was compressed into the humble second class carriage, cheerless and cushionless, whirling through indefinite England in a way that confounded all their geography and topography.

Gradually as the day darkened into heavy, chilly July rain, the scarcely kept up spirits of the four passengers began to sink.

Johanna grew very white and worn, Selina became, to use Ascott's phrase, "as cross as two sticks," and even Hilary, turning her eyes from the gray sodden looking landscape without, could find no spot of comfort to rest on within the carriage, except that round rosy face of Elizabeth Hand's.
Whether it was from the spirit of contradiction existing in most such natures, which, especially in youth, are more strong than sweet, or from a better feeling, the fact was noticeable, that when every one else's spirits went down Elizabeth's went up.

Nothing could bring her out of a "grumpy" fit so satisfactorily as her mistresses falling into one.

When Miss Selina now began to fidget hither and thither, each tone of her fretful voice seeming to go through her eldest sister's every nerve, till even Hilary said, impatiently, "Oh, Selina, can't you be quiet ?" then Elizabeth rose from the depth of her gloomy discontent up to the surface immediately.
She was only a servant; but Nature bestows that strange vague thing that we term "force of character" independently of position.