"She looks jolly when she smiles." "Perhaps she'll smarten up soon," suggested Addie Knighton.

"That blue dress suits her; it just matches her eyes." To Ulyth's fastidious taste Rona's clothes looked hopelessly ill-cut and colonial, especially as her room-mate put them on anyhow, and seemed to have no regard at all for appearances.

A girl who did not mind whether she looked really trim, spruce and smart, must indeed have spent her life in the backwoods.
"Didn't you even have a governess in New Zealand ?" she ventured one day.
She did not encourage Rona to talk, but for once her curiosity overcame her dislike of the high-pitched voice.
"Couldn't get one to stop up-country, where we were.

Mrs.Barker, our cowman's wife, looked after me ever since Mother died.

She was the only woman about the place.