Ellen at first started a little aghast at this gigantic fleshliness, this general slough and slump of outline, this insistency of repellent curves, and then the old woman spoke and thrust out a great, soft hand, and the heart of the child overleaped her artistic sense and her reason, and she thought old Mrs.Mitchell beautiful.

Mrs.Mitchell never failed to regale her with a superior sort of cooky, and often with a covert peppermint, and that although the Mitchells were not well off.

The old place was mortgaged, and Miss Mitchell had hard work to pay the interest.

Ellen had the vaguest ideas about the mortgage, and was half inclined to think it might be a disfiguring patch in the plastering of the sitting-room, which hung down in an unsightly fashion with a disclosure of hairy edges, and threatened danger to the heads underneath.
Often of a Saturday afternoon Ellen went to visit Miss Mitchell and her mother, and really preferred them to friends of her own age.
Miss Mitchell had a store of superannuated paper dolls which dated from her own childhood.

Their quaint costumes, and old-fashioned coiffures, and simpers were of overwhelming interest to Ellen.