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.

"Well," said Roger, "I was telling you how I got Jesus. I was going
along Margate High Street, and I saw a crowd, and I hear