lishment was full of
the self-respect which showed itself in a scrupulous consideration for
the rights and claims, the doings and feelings, of others.

Rose did not complain because Mrs. Jennings and her house alike were
also antiquated and formal. But the lady was not merely formal; it was a
point of honour and an inveterate weakness with her to refuse to own
that she had anything to do with such small but welcome boons to her as
boarders. There she sat, serenely disclaiming the slightest knowledge of
what had taken place, and attributing every attention to her old servant
Susan, who had been with Mrs. Jennings since her marriage
five-and-thirty years before. Or, if it was not Susan, it was her
coadjutor, Marianne, in her housemaid's neat dress, whom Susan, in her
working housekeeper's black cap and gold-rimmed spectacles, had trained
to all fit and proper service in a gentlewoman's house.

In person Mrs. Jennings was tall and thin, sallow, and slightly
hook-nosed, but still handsome. Her upright, broad-shouldered, and, by
comparison, slender waisted figure was conventionally good; but it was
hard to say how far it was her own, or how much it was made up. For she
was one of those women who consider that it is a duty which they owe to
the world not only to show themselves to the best advantage in bodily
presence to the last, but so to conceal and atone for the ravages of
time as to preserve a semblance of their maturity after it is long past.
The performance is not altogether successful. For one thing, it is apt
to call forth a spirit of contemptuous pity in the youthful spectator
who is still a long way from needing to employ such laborious,
self-denying arts.

Mrs. Jennings added to her natural air of dignity by a filmy shawl of
black lace in summer, and of white Shetland wool in winter, draped round
her without so much as a fold out of order, and by a somewhat elaborate
modification of a widow's cap which added half an inch to her height. As
Rose wrote in an early letter home, Mrs. Jennings's cap looked as if she
had been born with it on her coal black hair, or as if it were glued and
gummed there beyond any possibility of being displaced. Mother ought to
see it, take an example, and abandon her flighty, waggling head-gear.
No, on second thoughts, Rose would not like to see mother with a cap
fitted on her head like the bowl of a helmet, and giving the idea of
such stony stability that it might have been fastened wi