She was not elegantly dressed, but a noble–looking woman, and the girls thought the gray cloak and unfashionable bonnet covered the most splendid mother in the world.
It came in as a kind of a rude word really, a mocking word for somebody seen as socially inadequate, or somehow rather unfashionable, or contemptible in some way.
She was not elegantly dressed, but a noble-looking woman, and the girls thought the gray cloak and unfashionable bonnet covered the most splendid mother in the world.