Only white flowers came into this room, where there were blue vases for them, not a book was to be seen without a blue alpaca cover.

Here Miss Ailie received visitors in her white with the blue braid, and enrolled new pupils in blue ink with a white pen.

Some laughed at her, others remembered that she must have something to love after Miss Kitty died.
Miss Ailie had her romance, as you may hear by and by, but you would not have thought it as she came forward to meet you in the blue-and-white room, trembling lest your feet had brought in mud, but too much a lady to ask you to stand on a newspaper, as she would have liked dearly to do.

She was somewhat beyond middle-age, and stoutly, even squarely, built, which gave her a masculine appearance; but she had grown so timid since Miss Kitty's death that when she spoke you felt that either her figure or her manner must have been intended for someone else.

In conversation she had a way of ending a sentence in the middle which gave her a reputation of being "thro'ither," though an artificial tooth was the cause.