below her waist. She wore a holland blouse and skirt, a sailor
hat trimmed with a band of Rowsley's ribbon, brown cotton
stockings, and brown sandshoes bought for 5/11-3/4 of Chapman,
the leading draper in Chilmark High Street. Isabel made her own
clothes and made them badly. Her skirt was short in front and
narrow below the waist, and her sailor blouse was comfortably but
inelegantly loose round the armholes. Laura Clowes, who had a
French instinct of dress, and would have clad Isabel as Guinevere
clad Enid, if Isabel had not been prouder than Enid, looked after
her with a smile and a sigh: it was a grief to her to see her
young friend so shabby, but, bless the child! how little she
cared--and how little it signified after all! Isabel's poverty
sat as light on her spirits as the sailor hat, never straight,
sat on her upflung head.

Isabel knew every one in Chilmark parish. Pausing before a knot
of boys playing marbles: "Herbert," she said sternly, "why
weren't you at school on Sunday?" Old Hewett, propped like a
wheezy mummy against the oak tree that shaded the Prince of
Wales's Feathers, brought up his stiff arm slowly in a salute to
the vicar's daughter. "'Evening," said Isabel cheerfully, "what a
night for rheumatics isn't it?" Hewitt chuckled mightily at this
subtle joke. "'Evening, Isabel," called out Dr. Verney, putting
up one finger to his cap: he considered one finger enough for a
young lady whom he had brought into the world. Isabel knew every
one in Chilmark and every one knew her. Such a range of
intensive acquaintance is not so narrow as people who have never
lived in a country village are apt to suppose.

Past the schoolhouse, past the wide stone bridge where Isabel