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On the wide matting-covered couches extending along the sidewalls, lounged sallow-faced Orientals, while in and out among the diners noiselessly moved the waiters, balancing on their heads, large brown straw trays. Snowy rice cakes, shreds of candied cocoanut, preserved ginger and brown paper-shell nuts with the usual Chinese eating utensils were placed before us.
Mademoiselle Saget was so slight and thin that she always managed to insinuate herself into a place on one of the benches. She listened to what was being said, and started a conversation with her neighbour, some sallow-faced workingman's wife, who sat mending linen, from time to time producing handkerchiefs and stockings riddled with holes from a little basket patched up with string.
Nevertheless, as he lived in a spacious house in Golden Square, which, in addition to a brass plate upon the street-door, had another brass plate two sizes and a half smaller upon the left hand door-post, surrounding a brass model of an infant's fist grasping a fragment of a skewer, and displaying the word 'Office, it was clear that Mr Ralph Nickleby did, or pretended to do, business of some kind; and the fact, if it required any further circumstantial evidence, was abundantly demonstrated by the diurnal attendance, between the hours of half-past nine and five, of a sallow-faced man in rusty brown, who sat upon an uncommonly hard stool in a species of butler's pantry at the end of the passage, and always had a pen behind his ear when he answered the bell.
"A year ago Alf Drew would have felt at home in this cigarette-puffing, sallow-faced lot, wouldn't be?" grinned Harry. "I am glad to say that Alf now knows how measly a cigarette smoker looks," answered Tom. Alf Drew, as readers of the preceding volume will remember, was a boy addicted to cigarettes, but whom Tom had broken of the stupid habit.
We hung up our things in the hall and passed into a long room, in which were some fifteen or twenty people. Most of them were sitting round a chemin de fer table; a few were standing at the sideboard eating sandwiches. A dark-haired, dark-eyed, sallow-faced man, a trifle corpulent, undeniably Semitic, who seemed to be in charge of the place, came up and shook hands with Mr. Parker.
Then, far off in the distance, they heard the sounds of a struggle, and presently Marjolin came back again, bringing the goose with him. Mother Palette, a sallow-faced old woman, took it in her arms and clasped it for a moment to her bosom, in the classic attitude of Leda. "Well, well, I'm sure I don't know what I should have done if you hadn't been here," said she.
He was whirling a wheel and rolling a ball and calling out in his heavy voice. With him was a little, sallow-faced man, like a wolf, with sneaky, downcast eyes and restless hands. He answered to the name of Andy. These two were engaged in fleecing several blue-shirted, half- drunken spikers. Durade was playing faro with four other men, or at least there were that number seated with him.
Near the exit a half suppressed squeal caused him to swing round. He had stepped squarely on the toe of a meager individual, who now sat nursing his foot in bitter dejection. "Pardon " began Sir Griffin, then stopped and glared at the sallow-faced person. Sir Griffin stared hard at the man he had stepped on, and at his female companion. "Damn it!" he cried.
Flopper, or, as he called her, "Flopsie," the coachman, and Lady Winsleigh's own maid, Louise Renaud, a prim, sallow-faced Frenchwoman, who, by reason of her nationality, was called by all the inhabitants of the kitchen, "mamzelle," as being a name both short, appropriate, and convenient.
He had a perfectly smooth face, ruddy complexion, and fair hair. He was of middle height, and was rather inclined to stoutness. He was so fond of talking that his comrades nicknamed him "Magpie." A colonist by birth, he could speak the Kaffir language like a native. Whitson was a sallow-faced, spare-built man of short stature, with dark-brown beard and hair, and piercing black eyes.
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