the brows were still sleek.  She did it, Ellen told herself with a tightening of her lips, as a person who would like to spend the afternoon playing the piano but is obliged to receive a visitor instead and strums on her knee.  It was the only expression the occasion allowed for that passionate care for her own person which accounted for the inordinate beauty of her clothes.  They were, she said to herself, using a phrase which she had always previously disliked, fair ridiculous for a woman of that age.  They were, almost sinisterly, not accidental.  The very dark brown hat on her head was just sufficiently like in shape to the crowns that Russian empresses wear in pictures to heighten the effect of majesty, which, Ellen supposed without approval, was what she was aiming at by her manner, and yet plain enough to heighten that effect in another way by suggesting that the wearer was a woman so conscious of advantage other than physical that she could afford to accept her middle age.  And its colour was cunningly chosen to change her colour from mere swarthiness to something brown that holds the light like amber.  Ellen felt pleased at her own acumen in discovering the various fraudulent designs of this hat, and at the back of her mind she wondered not unhopefully if this meant that she too would be clever about clothes.  They must, moreover, have cost what, again using a phrase that had always before seemed quite horrid, she called to herself a pretty penny, for the materials had been made to satisfy some last refinement of exigence which demanded textures which should keep their own qualities yet ape their opposites, and the dark fur on her coat seemed a weightless softness like tulle, and the chestnut-coloured stuff of the coat and the dress beneath it was thick and rough like fur and yet as supple as the yellow silk of her fichu, which itself was sensually heavy with its own richness.

And as Ellen looked, the forefinger swept again the sleek eyebrows.  Really, it was terrible that Richard’s mother should be so deep in crime as to be guilty of offences that are denounced at two separate sorts of public meetings.  She was a squaw who was all that men bitterly say women are, not loving life and the way of serving it, undesirous of power, content against all reason with her corruptible body and the clothing and adorning of it.  She was an economic parasite, setting wage-slaves to produce luxuries for her to enjoy in idleness while millions of honest, hard-working people have to exist without the bare necessities of life.  And now she was leaning forward, insolently untroubled by guilt, and saying in that voice that was too lazy to articulate: 

“You won’t like anchovies; those things they’re helping you to now.”