Fact'ry 'Ands by Edward Dyson

FEATHERS christened her the Man-Eater. The implication was that Porline was the counterpart of the devilish adventuress in the popular melodrama, who consumes men with undiminishable appetite. Porline was small, and so thin that her whole osseous structure stood out like a skeleton in a bran sack; she was ugly, and no longer young; her mere wisp of hair was drawn tight into a tiny knot at the top, augmented with scraps of black ribbon; she had deeply-sunken beady, black eyes, and her complexion, indeed, her whole binding, was leathery.

There was a painful cheerfulness about Porline, an inexcusable skittishness that might have hurt finer sensibilities than those common in the bag factory. She made an affectation of being a devil of a fellow, which, taken in conjunction with her manifest disabilities, was quite pitiful, but the hands did not see it in that light.