Her own People by B. M. Croker

Verona was now painfully conscious that she could no longer harbour illusions, and had begun to realise her situation, her relations and her home. Her home, large, dark, straggling, with an atmosphere close and airless, the handsome furniture, picked up at auctions -- dead bargains, surrounded by a deep verandah and a bushy garden, full of old apricots, cork trees, dried-up water channels, straggling rose bushes, beds of tomatoes and a few sickly orange trees.

She understood and conformed to the daily routine of the household. There was the scrambling breakfast at nine o'clock, at which neither her father nor grandmother appeared. The latter partook of coffee and "hoppers" in the seclusion of her own quarters, and busied herself with the feeding of fine buff fowl, making coffee and condiments, and giving audience and medicine to numbers of native visitors, chiefly the sick and afflicted. Dominga, her red mane in two thick plaits, wearing a dressing-gown and slippers, practised her songs, knitted ties, wrote letters, or lay on her bed, devouring novels and bazaar sweetmeats -- such as paras and jalabies -- having commandeered the sole punkah coolie.