She was a buff-and-gray-colored creature, with a narrow square chin and narrow square shoulders, and a flatness and straightness about her everywhere that gave her rather the effect of a wedge, to which the big black straw hat she wore tilted a little on one side somehow conduced.

Miss Kimpsey might have figured anywhere as a representative of the New England feminine surplus--there was a distinct suggestion of character under her unimportant little features--and her profession was proclaimed in her person, apart from the smudge of chalk on the sleeve of her jacket.

She had been born and brought up and left over in Illinois, however, in the town of Sparta, Illinois.

She had developed her conscience there, and no doubt, if one knew it well, it would show peculiarities of local expansion directly connected with hot corn-bread for breakfast, as opposed to the accredited diet of legumes upon which consciences arrive at such successful maturity in the East.

It was, at all events, a conscience in excellent controlling order.