Rose Fletcher had had a peculiar training.

She had in one sense belonged to the ranks of the fully sophisticated, who are supposed to swim on the surface of things and catch all the high lights of existence, like bubbles, and in another sense it had been very much the reverse.

She might, so far as one side of her character was concerned, have been born and brought up in East Westland, as her mother had been before her.

She had a perfect village simplicity and wonder at life, as to a part of her innermost self, which was only veneered by her contact with the world.

In part she was entirely different from all the girls in the place, and the difference was really in the grain.