It best suited the convenience of the family to dine at five o'clock; a long evening, so necessary to most literary people, was thus assured.
Marian, as always when she had spent a day at the Museum, was faint with weariness and hunger; she cut a small piece of bread from a loaf on the table, and sat down in an easy chair.
Presently appeared a short, slight woman of middle age, plainly dressed in serviceable grey.

Her face could never have been very comely, and it expressed but moderate intelligence; its lines, however, were those of gentleness and good feeling.

She had the look of one who is making a painful effort to understand something; this was fixed upon her features, and probably resulted from the peculiar conditions of her life.
'Rather early, aren't you, Marian ?' she said, as she closed the door and came forward to take a seat.
'Yes; I have a little headache.' 'Oh, dear! Is that beginning again ?' Mrs Yule's speech was seldom ungrammatical, and her intonation was not flagrantly vulgar, but the accent of the London poor, which brands as with hereditary baseness, still clung to her words, rendering futile such propriety of phrase as she owed to years of association with educated people.

In the same degree did her bearing fall short of that which distinguishes a lady.

The London work-girl is rarely capable of raising herself or being raised, to a place in life above that to which she was born; she cannot learn how to stand and sit and move like a woman bred to refinement, any more than she can fashion her tongue to graceful speech.