well as draggled by the winter, chirping sweetly and sadly on a bare
bough that she could not have believed such things of the weather. Yet
once she must have been like Ellen; her hair was the ashes of such a
fire as burned over Ellen's brows, and she had Ellen's short upper lip,
though of course she had never been fierce nor a swift runner, and no
present eye could guess if she had ever been a focus of romantic love.
The aged are terrible--mere heaps of cinders on the grass from which
none can tell how tall the flames once were or what company gathered
round them.

She struck him as being very old to be Ellen's mother, for when he had
been seventeen his mother had still been a creature of brilliant eyes
and triumphant moments, but perhaps it was poverty that had made her so
dusty and so meagre. "Yes, they are very poor," he groaned to himself.
The room was so low, the fireplace so small a hutch of cast-iron, the
wallpaper so yellow and so magnified a confusion of roses, and so
unsuggestive of summer; the fatigued brown surface of the leather
upholstery was coming away in strips like curl-papers; there were big
steel engravings of Highland cattle enjoying domestic life under adverse
climatic conditions, and Queen Victoria giving religion a leg up by
signing things in the presence of bishops and handing niggers
Bibles--engravings which they obviously didn't like, since here and
there were little home-made pictures made out of quite good plates torn
from art magazines, but which they had kept because no secondhand
dealers would give any money for them, and the walls had to be covered
somehow. And there was nothing pretty anywhere.

The little brown bird of a woman was asking in a kind, interested way if
he were a stranger to Edinburgh, and he was telling her how long he had
been in Broxburn and what he did there, and when he mentioned cordite