The conservatory, like everything else in the house, had a shabby and rather dull appearance. Fresh plants were wanted and some of the windows were cracked.
“I wonder if what Winnie told me just now is true; if we are going to be very poor?” Polly said to herself.
She looked about her to-day with new eyes, and a certain seriousness stole into her brown, mischievous face.
She was quite a contrast to her sisters, both of whom resembled their mother. Polly, on the other hand, was neither like her father nor her mother. When this was remarked upon she got very angry.
“I hark back,” she would observe. “Goodness knows who I am like. I don’t think it matters much; looks are not everything, are they?”
For silly little Polly imagined that because she inherited neither her father’s good looks, nor her mother’s once undoubted beauty, she must perforce be exceedingly plain. She was, on the contrary, exceedingly pretty, a fact that was making itself patent to more than one person by slow degrees.
She was a very young girl, a real old-fashioned young lady, with her head crammed with romantic ideas and any amount of illusions.
She loved sweets and spent all her modest pocket money on chocolate caramels and Turkish delight. Her age was seventeen and a half, and she looked at least two years younger than that, very unlike Winifred, whose nineteen summers might easily have passed for twenty-five.
Polly’s hair was, again, a contrast to her sisters’. Winifred had masses of soft dun-colored hair, Christina a wealth of warm brown tresses. Polly’s hair was uncompromisingly dark, hair that was never very tidy, but never needed tongs or curling paper, since it had a trick of framing itself about her small head in a most seductively caressing manner.
She called her nose a disgrace to her family. It was a nondescript nose, not quite straight, with a wonderful amount of humor in the cut of the nostrils. It would have been impossible to imagine any other nose to match with those queer, lovely eyes of hers, eyes which had the strangest and quickest gradations of color in them, and which, like their prototype, the sea, could in an instant flash green and then grow wonderfully blue.