There was something very real and individual about her; she was no “girl of the period,” made up by the fashion of the day.  She would have grown just as a rose or a violet would, the same in the first quarter of the century or the third.  They called her “grandmotherly” sometimes, when a certain quaint primitiveness that was in her showed itself.  And yet she was the youngest girl in all that set, as to simpleness and freshness and unpretendingness, though she was in her twentieth year now, which sounds—­didn’t somebody say so over my shoulder?—­so very old!  Adelaide Marchbanks used to say of her that she had “stayed fifteen.”

She looked real.  Her bright hair was gathered up loosely, with some graceful turn that showed its fine shining strands had all been freshly dressed and handled, under a wide-meshed net that lay lightly around her head; it was not packed and stuffed and matted and put on like a pad or bolster, from the bump of benevolence, all over that and everything else gentle and beautiful, down to the bend of her neck; and her dress suggested always some one simple idea which you could trace through it, in its harmony, at a glance; not complex and bewildering and fatiguing with its many parts and folds and festoonings and the garnishings of every one of these.  She looked more as young women used to look before it took a lady with her dressmaker seven toilsome days to achieve a “short street suit,” and the public promenades became the problems that they now are to the inquiring minds that are forced to wonder who stops at home and does up all the sewing, and where the hair all comes from.

Some of the girls said, sometimes, that “Leslie Goldthwaite liked to be odd; she took pains to be.”  This was not true; she began with the prevailing fashion—­the fundamental idea of it—­always, when she had a new thing; but she modified and curtailed,—­something was sure to stop her somewhere; and the trouble with the new fashions is that they never stop.  To use a phrase she had picked up a few years ago, “something always got crowded out.”  She had other work to do, and she must choose the finishing that would take the shortest time; or satin folds would cost six dollars more, and she wanted the money to use differently; the dress was never the first and the must be; so it came by natural development to express herself, not the rampant mode; and her little ways of “dodging the dressmaker,” as she called it, were sure to be graceful, as well as adroit and decided.

It was a good thing for a girl like Ruth, just growing up to questions that had first come to this other girl of nineteen four years ago, that this other had so met them one by one, and decided them half unconsciously as she went along, that now, for the great puzzle of the “outside,” which is setting more and more between us and our real living, there was this one more visible, unobtrusive answer put ready, and with such a charm of attractiveness, into the world.