midday
Yes , take it off . That close bonnet ca n't be very comfortable when one 's tired . '' Ellen stared like a rude child as the woman slowly , with shapeless red fingers , untied her bonnet-strings and revealed herself as something at once agelessly primitive and most modernly degenerate . The frizzed thicket of coarse hair which broke into a line of tiny , quite circular curls round her low forehead made Ellen remember side-streets round Gorgie and Dalry , which the midday hooters filled with factory girls horned under their shawls with Hinde 's curlers ; yet made her remember also vases and friezes in museums where crimped , panoplied priestesses dispensed archaic rites . Her features were so closely moulded to the bone , her temples so protuberant , and her eyes sunk in such pits of sockets that one had to think of a skull , a skull found in hot sand among ruins . The ruins of some lost Nubian city , the mind ran on , for the fulness of her lips compared with the thinness of her cheeks gave her a negroid look ; yet the smallness and poor design of her bones marked her as reared in an English slum . But her rich colour declared that neither that upbringing , nor any of the mean conditions which her bearing showed had pressed in upon her since her birth , had been able to destroy her inner resource of vitality .