Shirt-sleeves

A bunch of workmen were lying on the grass of the park beside Macquarie Street, in the dinner hour. It was winter, the end of May, but the sun was warm, and they lay there in shirt-sleeves, talking.

In shirt-sleeves, the way I generally worked, I sat sketching a bar of soap taped to an upper corner of my drawing board.

As Sherma S. Vinograd points out that we move from “Arms that are braceleted and white and bare” near the table and shawl to the narrow streets inhabited by “lonely men in shirt-sleaves."^([sic])