he
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."

Ellen made a confused noise as if she were committing an indiscretion,
and was furious at having made it, and then furious that she had
betrayed the fact that she did not know an anchovy when she saw it; and
then furious when the next moment Marion let the waiter put the limp
bronze things on her own plate. Why shouldn't she like them if Marion
did? Did Marion think she was a child who liked nothing b