She had a shock of untidy brown hair, hazel-green eyes, a thin bony face, and an unexpectedly charming one-sided smile.
Her clothes were drab and unattractive and she usually had on lisle-thread stockings with holes in them.
She looked, I decided this morning, much more like a horse than a human being.
In fact, she would have been a very nice horse with a little grooming.
She spoke, as usual, in a kind of breathless rush:
"I've been up to the farm - you know, Lasher's - to see if they'd got any duck eggs.
They've got an awfully nice lot of little pigs.
Sweet!
Do you like pigs?
I do. I even like the smell."
"Well-kept pigs shouldn't smell," I said.
"Shouldn't they?
They all do around here.
Are you walking down to the town?
I saw you were alone, so I thought I'd stop and walk with you, only I stopped rather suddenly."
"You've torn your stocking," I said.
Megan looked rather ruefully at her right leg.
"So I have.
But it's got two holes already, so it doesn't matter very much, does it?"
"Don't you ever mend your stockings, Megan?"
"Rather.
When Mummie catches me.
But she doesn't notice awfully what I do - so it's lucky in a way, isn't it?"
"You don't seem to realize you're grown up," I said.
"You mean I ought to be more like your sister?
All dolled up?"
I rather resented this description of Joanna.
"She looks clean and tidy and pleasing to the eye," I said.
"She's awfully pretty," said Megan.
"She isn't a bit like you, is she?
Why not?"
"Brothers and sisters aren't always alike."
"No.
Of course I'm not very like Brian or Colin.
And Brian and Colin aren't like each other."
She paused and said,
"It's very rum, isn't it?"
"What is?"
Megan replied briefly:
"Families."
I said thoughtfully,
"I suppose they are."
I wondered just what was passing in her mind.
We walked on in silence for a moment or two, then Megan said in a rather shy voice,
"You fly, don't you?"
"Yes."
"That's how you got hurt?"
"Yes, I crashed." Megan said,
"Nobody down here flies."
"No," I said, "I suppose not.