The first day of spring this year will fall on a Tuesday.

All were waiting : uncle Charles, who sat far away in the shadow of the window, Dante and Mr Casey, who sat in the easy chairs at either side of the hearth, Stephen, seated on a chair between them, his feet resting on a toasting boss.

[…] a frizzy half-white woman who looked as if she had fallen into a flour-sack, her face was so deep in powder, and her frizzy hair and her brown silk dress so douched with the white dust of it.

It was a source of murmuring discontent to her, in the first years of an intelligent girlhood, to feel how entirely they (for it was always 'they' in her thought) had been shut out from the fairer social world, the victims of she scarcely knew what, but helpless in that victimage, and utterly weak to master circumstances.