Straitened circumstances would not have mattered; a mother would have managed somehow.

In the '80s such a dress would have indicated considerable financial means; under the sun-helmet it was an anachronism; and yet it served only to add a quainter charm to the girl's beauty.
"Do you know what you make me think of ?" "What ?" "As if you had stepped out of some old family album." The feminine vanities in Ruth were quiescent; nothing had ever occurred in her life to tingle them into action.

She was dressed as a white woman should be; and that for the present satisfied her instincts.

But she threw a verbal bombshell into the spinsters' camp.
"What is a family album ?" "You poor child, do you mean to tell me you've never seen a family album?
Why, it's a book filled with the photographs of your grandmothers and grandfathers, your aunts and uncles and cousins, your mother and father when they were little." Ruth stood with drawn brows; she was trying to recall.

"No; we never had one; at least, I never saw it." The lack of a family album for some reason put a little ache in her heart.