She is a fine old lady, handsome, stately, wonderfully neat, and has such a back and such a stomacher that if her stays should turn out when she dies to have been a broad old-fashioned family fire-grate, nobody who knows her would have cause to be surprised.

Weather affects Mrs.Rouncewell little.

The house is there in all weathers, and the house, as she expresses it, "is what she looks at." She sits in her room (in a side passage on the ground floor, with an arched window commanding a smooth quadrangle, adorned at regular intervals with smooth round trees and smooth round blocks of stone, as if the trees were going to play at bowls with the stones), and the whole house reposes on her mind.

She can open it on occasion and be busy and fluttered, but it is shut up now and lies on the breadth of Mrs.Rouncewell's iron-bound bosom in a majestic sleep.
It is the next difficult thing to an impossibility to imagine Chesney Wold without Mrs.Rouncewell, but she has only been here fifty years.
Ask her how long, this rainy day, and she shall answer "fifty year, three months, and a fortnight, by the blessing of heaven, if I live till Tuesday." Mr.Rouncewell died some time before the decease of the pretty fashion of pig-tails, and modestly hid his own (if he took it with him) in a corner of the churchyard in the park near the mouldy porch.

He was born in the market-town, and so was his young widow.