Page:Eliot - Felix Holt, the Radical, vol. III, 1866.djvu/168

158 nasty business. I shall have my hair combed at the sessions for a year to come. But, heyday! What dame is this, with a small boy?—not one of my parishioners?"

Harold and Esther turned, and saw an elderly woman advancing with a tiny red-haired boy, scantily attired as to his jacket, which merged into a small sparrow-tail a little higher than his waist, but muffled as to his throat with a blue woollen comforter. Esther recognised the pair too well, and felt very uncomfortable. We are so pitiably in subjection to all sorts of vanity—even the very vanities we are practically renouncing! And in spite of the almost solemn memories connected with Mrs Holt, Esther's first shudder was raised by the idea of what things this woman would say, and by the mortification of having Felix in any way represented by his mother.

As Mrs Holt advanced into closer observation, it became more evident that she was attired with a view not to charm the eye, but rather to afflict it with all that expression of woe which belongs to very rusty bombazine and the limpest state of false hair. Still, she was not a woman to lose the sense of her own value, or become abject in her manners under any circumstances of depression; and she