Today she wore her best afternoon frock with a bodice en cœur, pale blue with white filigree—charming if one but overlooked the fact that it was suited to fashions popular three or four years past. This was Nottingham, however, and Mr. Olson would be disinclined to notice even if she presented herself in a costume of the second Charles’s reign. Or the first’s. Lucy doubted he would notice much at all, despite her looking quite well that afternoon. She was of slightly below-average stature, somewhat dark of complexion, and, if no striking beauty, she was, in the view of most men, certainly pretty with her long nose, arched brows over large eyes, and moderately, if not excessively, full lips. Mrs. Quince, who was very tall and slender, often called Lucy fat, but Lucy considered herself—in contrast to Mrs. Quince—to be shaped like a woman rather than, let us say, a boy.

It was no comfortable thing to put her appearance in such ungenerous hands, but Lucy thought it wisest to submit herself to the older woman’s grim ministrations. Mrs. Quince had ever been solicitous of Mr. Olson’s connection with Lucy, and had shown cheerless satisfaction with the proposal. Now she helped arrange Lucy’s hair, pulling on it, Lucy suspected, harder than necessary. Still, she was dexterous at such matters, and Mrs. Quince arranged her charge’s hair—just shy of black in its darkness—so that it appeared contained, and yet a few strands wantonly escaped from her bonnet to frame Lucy’s round face. When she was finished, Mrs. Quince paraded her before her sepia-toned mirror, and Lucy flattered herself that Mr. Olson would be getting no frump for his pains. Perhaps if he would flirt, she might like him better.

Mrs. Quince made one last adjustment. “I’ve done what I can,” she said. “Your hair is almost negro in its coarseness, and it clings to your head as though wetted by the rain.”