It was insignificant, and went on close to the curbstone.
Night, the early dirty night, the sinister, noisy, hopeless and rowdy night of South London, had overtaken her on her last cab drive.

In the gas-light of the low-fronted shops her big cheeks glowed with an orange hue under a black and mauve bonnet.
Mrs Verloc's mother's complexion had become yellow by the effect of age and from a natural predisposition to biliousness, favoured by the trials of a difficult and worried existence, first as wife, then as widow.

It was a complexion, that under the influence of a blush would take on an orange tint.

And this woman, modest indeed but hardened in the fires of adversity, of an age, moreover, when blushes are not expected, had positively blushed before her daughter.

In the privacy of a four-wheeler, on her way to a charity cottage (one of a row) which by the exiguity of its dimensions and the simplicity of its accommodation, might well have been devised in kindness as a place of training for the still more straitened circumstances of the grave, she was forced to hid from her own child a blush of remorse and shame.
Whatever people will think?
She knew very well what they did think, the people Winnie had in her mind--the old friends of her husband, and others too, whose interest she had solicited with such flattering success.