Benno and Some of the Push by Edward Dyson

JINNY BITT-known as Thripny-was going on for sixteen, too tall for her age and her width and her wearing apparel. Her shins were so thin they seemed to have a cutting edge, and there was too much of them visible, although the frayed, stained and faded skirt was let down so far in the hope of covering the deficiency that a wide gap existed between it and the skimpy body part of her costume, where a quantity of dun-coloured underclothing protruded. Her arms, too, were long and thin; so was her neck. The long, thin arms came far out of her tight sleeves, always worn at the elbow and torn in the armpit. The long, thin neck was surmounted by a very small head decorated with pale, drab-tinted hair that had been cropped within the year, and was now about a span in length, and amenable to no kind of treatment. It writhed like shrivelled pea-pods, and Miss Bitt thought it was curly.

Jinny wore a bit of stale red ribbon awkwardly knotted in the middle of her swan-like neck, but she was not a girl who put forth any pretensions to style. Her boots were heelless, and their symmetry had been destroyed by bigger feet. Her stockings had many holes. The hat she wore had been a "gem" in its day and generation, but most of the rim was nibbled off by the rats and cockroaches abounding on the factory flat, and its only ornaments were a bootlace and a large brass button. Miss Bitt might have picked up a better hat any day anywhere, but she seemed cheerfully unconscious of this one's imperfections.