Page 167 - sons-and-lovers

found himself at the top of a little wooden flight of steps,
and below him saw a room with windows round two sides,
and at the farther end half a dozen girls sitting bending over
the benches in the light from the window, sewing. They were
singing together ‘Two Little Girls in Blue”. Hearing the door
opened, they all turned round, to see Mr. Pappleworth and
Paul looking down on them from the far end of the room.
They stopped singing.
‘Can’t you make a bit less row?’ said Mr. Pappleworth.
‘Folk’ll think we keep cats.’
A hunchback woman on a high stool turned her long,
rather heavy face towards Mr. Pappleworth, and said, in a
contralto voice:
‘They’re all tom-cats then.’
In vain Mr. Pappleworth tried to be impressive for Paul’s
benefit. He descended the steps into the finishing-off room,
and went to the hunchback Fanny. She had such a short
body on her high stool that her head, with its great bands of
bright brown hair, seemed over large, as did her pale, heavy
face. She wore a dress of green-black cashmere, and her
wrists, coming out of the narrow cuffs, were thin and flat,
as she put down her work nervously. He showed her some-
thing that was wrong with a knee-cap.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘you needn’t come blaming it on to me.
It’s not my fault.’ Her colour mounted to her cheek.
‘I never said it WAS your fault. Will you do as I tell you?’
replied Mr. Pappleworth shortly.
‘You don’t say it’s my fault, but you’d like to make out as
it was,’ the hunchback woman cried, almost in tears. Then

1 Sons and Lovers