“You see, mother, it was Poppy who brought me to Jesus,” Roger said, a second before the door closed.  “I ...  I’d had a bit of trouble.  I’d been very foolish....  I’ll tell you about that later.  It isn’t because I’m cowardly and unrepentant that I won’t tell it now.  I’ve told it once on the Confession Bench in front of lots of people, so I’m not a coward.  And I don’t believe,” he declared, casting a look of dislike at Richard and Ellen, “that the Lord would want me to tell anybody but you about it.”  The servant returned, and he fell silent; with such an effect that she looked contemptuously at her mistress as she might have if bailiffs had been put into the house.  When she had gone he began again:  “It was this way Poppy did it.  After my trouble I was walking down Margate Broadway—­”

The woman in uniform made so emphatic a noise of impatience that they all turned and looked at her.  “There isn’t a Broadway in Margate!” she nearly snarled.  “It’s High Street, you mean.  The High Street.  Broadways they call them some places.  But not at Margate, not at Margate.”

“Neither it is,” said Roger adoringly.  “What a memory you’re got, Poppy!”

Marion rose from the table, laying her hand on the woman’s braided shoulders as she passed.  “Let’s come to the table and have some tea; and take your hat off, dear.  Yes, take it off.  That close bonnet can’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.  The final meaning of her was, perhaps, primitive and strong.  When she had stood about the room there had been a kind of hieratic dignity about her; she had that sanctioned effect upon the eye which is given by someone adequately imitating the pose of some famous picture or statue.  There flashed before Ellen’s mind the tail of some memory of an open place round which women stood looking just like this; but it was gone immediately.