steamy
with dishwashing. "Mother, they're bonny, bonny!" Mrs. Melville had been
greatly pleased, but had made light of it. "Och, they're nothing. We all
have them in our family. Ye have them yourself. Ye must always remember
ye got them from your great-grandmother Jeanie Napier, who was so much
admired by Sir Walter Scott at her first ball. And talking of dancing
...." and she had lifted up her skirts and set her feet waggishly
twinkling in a burlesque dance, which she followed up with a travesty of
an opera, a form of art she had met with in her youth and about which,
since she was the kind of woman who could have written songs and ballads
if she had lived in the age when wood fires and general plenty made the
hearth a home for poetry, she could be passionately witty as artists are
about work that springs from aesthetic principles different from their
own. It had been a lovely performance. They had ended in a tempest of
laughter, which had been brought to a sudden check when they had looked
at the clock and seen that it was actually twenty-five to one, which was
somehow so much worse than half-past twelve! It was that moment that had
been recalled to Ellen by the sudden interruption of the pulses of the
night by the nurses' laughter. That had been a beautiful party.

She would never be at another, and looked down lovingly on her mother's
face, and was horrified by its extreme ugliness. There was no longer any
gallant Tom Thumb wit strutting about her eyes and mouth, no little
tender cheeping voice to distract the attention from the hideous ruin
time had worked in her. Age diffused through her substance, spoiling
every atom, attacking its contribution to the scheme of form and colour.
It had pitted her skin with round pores and made lie from nose to mouth
thick folds such as coarse and valueless material might fall into, and
on her lids it was puckered like silk on the lid of a workbox; but if
she had opened them they would only have shown whites that had gone
yellow and were reticulated with tiny veins. It had turned her nose into
a beak and had set about the nostrils little red tendril-like lines. Her
lips were fissured with purple cracks and showed a few tall, narrow
teeth standing on the pale gleaming gum like sea-eroded rocks when the
tide is out. The tendons of her neck were like thick, taut string, and
the loose arras of flesh that hung between them would not be nice to
kiss, even though one loved her so much.