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What Mrs. Morland would have liked to do was to raise her face-à-main to her eyes, examine Anne with the air of a grande dame (to which phrase she attached really no meaning at all) and then dropping it greet her warmly and say how exactly like one of her parents she was. But the red dress she was wearing had red buttons down its front, and the red ribbon (to match, for this also gave her much innocent pleasure) had got entangled in the buttons, so she had to give it up as a bad job, and being really a simple creature at heart she embraced Anne very affectionately.

"Tony always says that I fly at people and kiss them in a kind of higher carelessness," she said. "But I do assure you I never kiss people I don't like. If I did begin to kiss the Bishop's wife, even by mistake, something would stop me."

"I only met her once," said Anne, finding it, to her own great surprise, quite easy to talk to someone as celebrated as Mrs. Morland, "at a prize-giving at the Barchester High School and she said prizes really meant nothing, so all the girls who got prizes hated her. If I'd had a prize I'd have hated her too. But I hated her anyway because she had a horrid hat."