In their Wisdom by C.P. Snow

In her bed-sitting-room in Barham Gardens, not far from Earl's Court tube station, Mrs Rastall was getting ready to go out. All was neat, as she was herself; so was her minuscule kitchen, and the bathroom, more precisely a shower room, her main luxury, from which she had just emerged. Once she had lived in opulence different from this, for she was old Massie's daughter, and was the woman whom the legatees had noticed, unobtrusive, unintroduced, at the funeral service. Not that she pitied herself overmuch because of the switchbacks of fortune. She didn't suppress her temper and her grievances, as she didn't consider herself a saint, but self-pity was to be pushed away. She could make do on very little, she had said for years: she had to and she did.

She was a small active woman getting on for fifty, looking younger, keeping a charm about which she was diffident. This diffidence, had been – though she didn't see it with the sharp eyes she used on others – a lifetime's handicap or wound. She wasn't sentimental about herself, and she didn't expend sentimentality on those she visited. She visited a number of people, since she spent her days working for a society which looked after the old, some of them not poorer than herself, some surviving on old age pensions, a good many of them shabby-genteel, depressed by what had happened to them.