Rose Millar had made up her mind to like everything, if possible, in her new surroundings, and when she came up to town it was not only by a piece of good fortune, it was to the girl's credit, that she found so much she could appreciate, and so little, comparatively, that it was difficult to put up with. In the first place, and as of primary consequence to Rose's well-being, Mrs. Jennings, the lady with whom Rose was boarded, turned out an excellently-disposed gentlewoman. She had a well-ordered house, pervaded with the spirit of a gentlewoman. The whole establishment 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.