The Judge

by Rebecca West

II

The door had swung ajar, so Mr. Mactavish James in his seat at his desk was able to look into the further room and keep an eye on Ellen, who was sitting with her back to him, supporting her bright head on her hand and staring fixedly down at something on the table. Her appearance entertained him, as it always did. He chuckled over the shapeless blue overall, just like a bairn's, that she wore on her neat wee figure, and the wild shining hair which resembled nothing so much as a tamarisk hedge in a high wind, though she would have barked like a terrier at anyone who suggested that it was not as neatly a done head as any in Edinburgh. But he was very anxious about her. For some moments now she had not moved, and this immobility was so unnatural in her that he knew she must be somehow deeply hurt, as one who sees a bird quite still knows that it is dead or dying. "Tuts, tuts," he sighed. "This must be looked to. She is the bonniest lassie that I've ever seen. Excepting Isabella Kingan." His right hand, which had been lying listlessly on the desk before him, palm upwards, turned over when he thought of Isabella Kingan. The fingers crooked, and it became an instrument of will, like the hand of a young man.

But he was really quite old, nearly seventy, and well on the way to lose the human obsession of the importance of humanity; so his attention began to note, as if they were not less significant than Ellen's agony, the motes that were dancing in the bar of pale autumn sunshine that lay athwart the room. "It is a queer thing," his mind droned on, "that when I came here when I was young I saw there was a peck of dust in every room, and I blamed old Mr. Logan for keeping on yon dirty old wife of a caretaker. I said to myself that when I was the master I would have it like a new pin and put a decent buddy in the basement. And now Mr. Logan is long dead, and the old wife is long dead, and I have had things my own way these many years, but the place is still foul as a lum, and I keep on yon slut of a Mrs. Powell. Ah well! Ah well!" He pondered, with a Scotch sort of enjoyment, on the frustration of youth's hopes and the progress of mortality in himself, until a movement of Ellen's bright head, such a jerk as might have been caused by a silent sob, brought his thoughts back to beauty and his small personal traffic with it.

"I do not know why she should mind me of Isabella Kingan. She is not like her. Isabella was black as a wee crow. It is just that they're both very bonny. I wonder what has happened to Isabella. She must be sixty-five. I saw her once in Glasgow, in Sauchiehall Street, after she was married, but she would not speak. Yet what else could I have done? I had my way to make, and it was known up and down the length of Edinburgh that her mother kept a sweetie shop in Leith Walk, and she had a cousin who was a policeman in the town. No, no, it would not have been a suitable marriage."

He moved restlessly in his chair, vexed by a sense of guilt, which although he immediately mitigated it into a suspicion that he might have behaved more wisely, made his memory maliciously busy opening doors which he had believed he had locked. But he was so expert in the gymnastic art of standing well with himself and the world that he could turn each recollected incident to a cause of self-approbation before he had begun to flush. For a few moments, using the idioms of Burns' love-lyrics, which were the only dignified and unobscene references to passion he had ever encountered, he thought of that night when he had persuaded little Isabella to linger in the fosse of shadow under the high wall in Canaan Lane and give up her mouth to his kisses, her tiny warm dove's body to his arms. Never in all the forty-five intervening years had he seen such a wall on such a night, its base in velvety darkness and its topmost half shining ghostly as plaster does in moonlight, without his hands remembering the queer pleasure it had been to crush crisp muslin, without his heart remembering the joy it had been to coax from primness its first consent to kisses. Before he could reproach himself for having turned that perfect hour into a shame to her who gave it by his later treachery, he began to reflect what a steady young fellow he had been to have known no other amorous incident in all his unmarried days than this innocent fondling on a summer's night.

But there pressed in on him the recollection of how she had dwined away when she realised that, though he had kissed her, he did not mean to marry her. He saw again the pale face she ever after wore; he remembered how, when he met her in the street, she used at first to droop her head and blush, until her will lifted her chin like a bearing-rein and she forced herself to a proud blank stare, while her small stature worked to make her crinoline an indignant spreading majesty behind her. Yet, after all, she was not the only person to be inconvenienced, for he had fashed himself a great deal over the business and had slept very badly for a time. He exhorted her reproachful ghost not to be selfish. Besides, she had somehow brought it on herself by looking what she did; for her dark eyes, very bright, yet with a kind of bloom on them, and her full though tiny underlip had always looked as if it would be very easy to make her cry, and she had had a preference for wearing grey and brown and such modest colours that made it plain she feared to be noticed. To display a capacity for pain so visibly was just to invite people to test it. If she had been a girl who could look after herself, doubtless she would have got him. He paid her the high compliment of wishing that she had, although he had done very well out of the marriages he had made, for his first wife, Annie Logan, had brought him his partnership in the firm, and his second, Christian Lawrie, had brought him a deal of money. But Isabella had been such a bonny wee thing.

His skin became alive again, and remembered the few responding kisses that he had wheedled from her, contacts so shy that they might have been the poisings of a moth. He shuddered, and said, "Ech! Somebody's walking over my grave!" though, indeed, what had happened was that his youth had risen from its grave. He decided to be generous to Isabella and not bear her a grudge for causing him this revisiting heartache. With the softest pity that the lot of beauty in this world should be so hard, though quite without self-condemnation, he thought how very sure the poor girl must have been that he meant to marry her before she abandoned that proud physical reserve that was the protecting integument of her sensitive soul. That sensitiveness seemed fair ridiculous when things were going well with him; but once or twice in his life, when he had been ill, it had appeared so dreadful that he had desired either to be young again and give a different twist to things, or to die utterly and know no after-life.

No, dealing unkindly with the lasses was an ill thing to do. It made one depressed afterwards even if it paid, just as cheating the widow and orphan did. His eyes went back to Ellen, who had moved again. "I must settle this business of Nelly's," he thought. "Of course, Philip is quite right. It would not be suitable. Besides, he is getting on nicely with Bob McLennan's girl, and that would be a capital match even for us. But I must put things straight for my Nelly, my poor wee Nelly." He rose, first feeling for his crutch, for he was fair dying on his legs with the gout, and padded slowly towards the open door.

And at the sound of that soft bearish tread Ellen felt as if she were going to die. There had arrived at last that moment for which she had waited with an increasing faintness all that day, since the moment when Mr. Philip had caught her in front of the mantelpiece mirror. She had gone to look at herself out of curiosity, to see whether she had in any way been changed by the extraordinary emotions that had lately visited her. For she had spent two horrible nights of hatred for Yaverland. She had begun to hate him quite suddenly when he brought her home to say good-night to her mother. There had broken out the usual tumult in the dancing-hall, and he had raised his head with an intent delighted look that at first she watched happily, because she loved to see his face, which too often wore gravity like a dark mask, grow brilliant with interest. But he quickly deleted that expression and shot a furtive glance at her, as if he feared she might have overheard his thoughts, and she saw that he was anxious that she should not share some imagination that had given him pleasure.

She went and sat on a low stool by the fire, turning her face away from him. So he was as little friendly as the rest of the world. Surely it was plain enough that she lived in the extremity of destitution. The only place that was hers was this drab little room with the shaking walls and peeling chairs; the only person that belonged to her was her mother, who was very dear but very old and grieving; and though everybody else on earth seemed to have acquired a paradise on easy terms, nobody would let her look in at theirs. It appeared that he was just like the others. She folded her arms across her breast to compress her swelling misery, while he sat there, cruelly not hurrying, and said courteous things that afterwards repeated themselves in her ear all night, each time a little louder, till by the dawn they had become ringing proclamations of indifference.

Yaverland had turned on the doorstep as he left and told her that, though he believed he had to motor-cycle to Glasgow the next day to see one of his directors there, it was just possible there might be a telephone message at his hotel telling him he need not do so; and he had asked that if this were so might he spend the time with her instead. Because of this she had lived all Sunday in the dread of his coming. Yet very often she found herself arrested in the midst of some homely action, letting some tap run on to inordinate splashings, some pot boil to an explosion of flavoured fumes, because she was brooding with an infatuated smile on his rich colours and rich ways, on the slouch by which he dissembled the strength of his body, the slow speech by which he dissembled the violence of his soul. But there returned at once her hatred of him, and she would long to lay her hand in his confidingly as if in friendship, and then drive her nails suddenly into his flesh, so that she would make a fool of him as well as hurt him. At that she would draw her cold hands across her hot brow, and wonder why she should think so malignantly of one who had been so kind—so much kinder than anybody else had ever been to her, although she had no claim upon him. Yet she knew that no argument could alter the fixed opinion of her spirit that Yaverland's kingly progress through the world, which a short time ago she had watched with such a singing of the veins as she knew when she saw lightning, was an insult to her lesser height, her contemned sex, her obscurity. The chaos in herself amazed her. The glass showed her that she was very pale, and she wondered if such pallor was a sign of madness. "I will not go daft!" she whimpered, and began rubbing her cheeks with her knuckles to bring back the colour; and saw among the quiet reflected things the queer face, its features pulled every way with derision, of Mr. Philip.

He said twangingly, "Ten minutes past nine, Miss Melville!"

Her heart was bursting with the thought of what made-up tales of vanity he would spin from this. "Later than that. Later than that," she told him wildly. "And I have been here since dear knows when, and there is nobody ready to give me work."

He shot out a finger. "What's that by your machine?"

She noticed that his finger was shaking, and that he too was very pale, and she forgot to feel rage or anything but immeasurable despair that she should have to live in this world where everyone was either inscrutably cruel or mad. She murmured levelly, dreamily, "Why, papers that you have just put down. I will type them at once. I will type them at once."

For a time he stood behind her at the hearth, breathing snortingly, and at times seeming to laugh; said in a half-voice, "A fire fit to roast an ox!" and for a space was busy moving lumps of coal down into the grate. A silence followed before he came to the other side of her table and said, "Stop that noise. I want to speak to you." The gesture was rude, but it was picoteed with a faint edge of pitifulness. The way he put his hand to his head suggested that he was in pain, so she shifted her hands from the keys and looked up vigilantly, prepared to be kind if he had need of it, for of course people in pain did not know what they were doing. But since there was no sense in letting people think they could just bite one's head off and nothing to pay, she said with spirit, "But it's ten minutes past nine, and what's this by my machine?"

Mr. Philip bowed his head with an air of meekness; he seemed to sway under the burden of his extreme humility, to be feeling sick under the strain of his extreme forbearance. He went on in a voice which implied that he was forgiving her freely for an orgy of impertinence. "Will you please take a note, Miss Melville, that Mr. Mactavish James wants to speak to you this afternoon?"

"He usually does," replied Ellen.

"Ah, but this is a special occasion," said Mr. Philip, with so genial an expression that she stared up at him, her eyebrows knit and her mouth puckering back a smile, her deep hopeful prepossession, which she held in common with all young people, that things really happened prettily, making her ready to believe that it was all a mistake and he was about to announce a treat or a promotion. And he, reading this ridiculous sign of youth, bent over her, prolonging his kind beam and her response to it, so that afterwards, when he undeceived her, there should be no doubt at all that she had worn that silly air of expecting something nice to be given to her, and no doubt that he had seen and understood and jeered at it. Then the wave of his malice broke and soused her. "Things have come to a head, Miss Melville! There's been a client complaining!"

She drew herself up. "A client complaining!" she cried, and he hated her still more, for she had again eluded him. She had forgotten him and the trap he had laid to make a fool of her in her suspicion that someone had dared to question her efficiency. "Well, what's that to do with me? Whoever's been complaining—and no doubt if your clients once began at that game they wouldn't need to stop between now and the one o'clock gun—it's not likely I'm among his troubles. So far as my work goes I'm practically infallible."

"It's not your work that's been spoken of," said Mr. Philip, laughing. "Perhaps we might call it your play."

He had begun to speak, as he always did when they were alone, in a thick whisper, as if they were doing something unlawful together. He had drawn near to her, as he always did, and was hunching his shoulders and making wriggling recessive movements such as a man might make who stood in darkness among moving pollutions. But his glee had gone. It had grown indeed to a grey effervescence that set a tremor working over his features, made him speak in shaken phrases, and unsteadied everything about him except the gloating stare which he bent on her bowed head because he was eager to see her face, which surely would look plain with all her colour gone. "There's just a limit to everything, Miss Melville, a limit to everything. You seem to have come to it. Ay, long ago, I have been thinking! You'd better know at once that you were seen late on Saturday night, hanging about with a man. It sounded like yon chemist chap from the description. You were seen entering a cab and driving away. I won't tell you"—he stepped backwards, swelled a little, and became the respectable man who has to hem a dry embarrassed cough before he speaks of evil—"what the client made of it all." And then he bent again in that contracted, loathing attitude, as if they were standing in an unspacious sewer and she had led him there, and with that viscous sibilance he said many things which she could not fully understand, but which seemed to mean that under decent life there was an oozy mud and she had somehow wallowed in it. "But doubtless you'll be able to give a satisfactory explanation of the incident," he finished; and as she continued to bow her head, so that he could not see the effects of this misery which he had so adroitly thrust upon her, he leant over her crying out he hardly knew what, save that they were persecuting things.

But when she slowly raised her chin he saw with rage that though he had spoilt the colour of her skin with fear, and made her break up the serene pattern of her features with twitching efforts to hold back her tears, he had not been able to destroy the secondary meaning of her face. It had ceased to be pretty; it no longer offered lovely untroubled surfaces to the lips. But it still proclaimed that she was indubitably precious as a diamond is indubitably hard; it still calmly declared that if evil had come out of his meeting with her it had been contrived out of innocence by some dark alchemy of his own soul; it still moved him to a madness of unprofitable loyalty and tenderness. In every way he was defeated. It seemed now the least of his miseries that he had failed to destroy his father's persuasion that Ellen was a person of value, for it was so much worse, it opened the door to so long a procession of noble and undesired desires, that he had not been able to destroy. That same persuasion in himself. He counted it a fresh grievance against her, and planned to pay it out with cruelty, that she had made him waste all his efforts. For though he had certainly made her cry, he could not count that any great triumph, since under the shower of her weeping her gaiety was dancing like a draggled elf. "Och me!" she was saying. "You want me to give you an explanation? But when I've got an appointment to talk the matter over with the head of the firm, what for would I waste my time talking it over with the junior partner?" And she began to type as if she was playing a jig.

He made a furious movement of the hands. She thought contemptuously, "The wee thing he is! Even if he struck me I should not be afraid. Now, if it were Yaverland, I should be terrified...." The idea struck through her like a pleasure, until there fell upon her as the completion of a misery that had seemed complete, like the last extreme darkness which falls on a dark night when the last star is found by the clouds, the recollection that Yaverland also was detestable. Ah, this was a piece of foolishness between Mr. Philip and herself. In a world where misery was the prevailing climate, where there were men like Yaverland, who could effortlessly deal out pain right and left by simply being themselves, it was so foolish that one who had surely had a natural turn for being nice, who had been so very nice that firelit evening when they had talked secrets, should put himself about to hurt her. Her eyes followed him imploringly as he went towards the door, and she cried out silently to him, begging him to be kind. But when he turned and looked over his shoulder she remembered his tyranny, and hardened her piteous gaze into a stare of loathing. It added to her sense of living in a deep cell of madness, fathoms below the rays of reason, that she had an illusion that in his eyes she saw just that same change from piteousness to loathing. For of course it could not be so.

Her quivering lips said gallantly to the banged door: "Well, there is my wurrk. I will forget my petty pairsonal troubles in my wurrk, just as men do!" And she typed away, squeezing out such drops of pride of craftsmanship as can be found in that mechanical exercise, making no mistakes, and ending the lines so that they built up a well-proportioned page, so intently that she had almost finished before she noticed that it was funny stuff about a divorce such as Mr. Mactavish James always gave to one of the male clerks to copy. But that was all the work she had to do that morning, for Mr. Mactavish James was up at the Court of Session and Mr. Philip did not send for her. She was obliged to sit in her idleness as in a bare cell, with nothing to look at but her misery, which continued to spin like a top, moving perpetually without getting any further or changing into anything else. Presently she went and knelt in the windowseat, drawing patterns on the glass and looking up the side-street at the Castle Rock, which now glowed with a dark pyritic lustre under the queer autumn day of bright south sunshine and scudding bruise-coloured clouds, seeing the familiar scene strangely, through a lens of tears. She fell to thinking out peppered phrases to say of the client who had told on her. Surely she had as much right in Princes Street as he had? And if it was too late for her to be there, then it was too late for him also. "It's just a case of one law for the man and another for the woman. Och, votes for women!" she cried savagely, and flogged the window with the blindcord. Ten to one it was yon Mr. Grieve, the minister of West Braeburn, who fairly blew in your face with waggishness when you offered him a chair in the waiting-room, and tee-heed that "a lawyer's office must be a dull place for a young leddy like you!" Well, she knew what Mr. Mactavish James thought of him for his dealings with his wife's money....

But the peppered phrases would not come. One cannot do more than one thing at a time fairly well, and she was certainly crying magnificently. "Such a steady downpour I never did see since that week mother and I spent at Oban," she thought into her sodden handkerchief. "It was a shame the way it rained all the time, when we had had to save for months to pay for the trip. But life is like that...." Ah, what did they think she had been doing with that man Yaverland? The shocked dipping undertones of Mr. Philip's voice, the ashamed heat of his eyes, were just the same as grown-up people used when they told mother why they had had to turn the maid away, and that, so far as she could make out, though they always spoke softly so that she could not hear, was because the maid had let somebody kiss her. What was the use of having been a quiet decent girl all her days, of never stopping when students spoke to her, of never wearing emerald green, though the colour went fine with her hair, when people were ready to believe this awful thing of her? They must be mad not to see that she would rather die than let any man on earth touch her in any way, and least of all Yaverland, whom she hated. There came before her eyes the memory of that bluish bloom on his lips and jaw which she had noticed the first time she saw him, and she rocked herself to and fro in a passion of tears at the thought she was suspected of close contact with this loathsome maleness. She felt as if there was buried in her bosom a harp with many strings, and each string was snapping separately.

"Och, votes for women!" she said wearily; and tried to make herself remember that after all there were some unstained noble things in the world by singing whisperingly a verse from the Women's Marseillaise. "There's many singing that song to-day in prison that would be glad to sit and breathe fresh air and look at a fine view as you're doing, so you ought to be thankful!" And indeed the view of the Castle did just for that moment distract her from the business of weeping, for there had been a certain violent alteration of the weather. The autumn sunshine, which had never been more than a sarcasm on the part of a thoroughly unpleasant day, had failed altogether, and Edinburgh had become a series of corridors through which there rushed a trampling wind. It set the dead leaves rising from the pavement in an exasperated, seditious way, and let them ride dispersedly through the eddying air far above the heads of the clambering figures that, up and down the side-street, stood arrested and, it seemed, flattened, as if they had been spatchcocked by the advancing wind and found great difficulty in folding themselves up again. She looked at their struggles with contempt. They were funny wee men. They were not like Yaverland. Now, he was a fine man. She thought proudly of the enormousness of his chest and shoulders, and imagined the tremendous thudding thing the heartbeat must be that infused with blood such hugeness. He must be one of the most glorious men who ever lived. It surely was not often that a man was perfect in every way physically and mentally.

She turned away and hid her face against the shutters, weeping bitterly. But her mind had to follow him in a kind of dream, as he walked on, masterfully, as one who knows he has the right to come and go, out of that wet grey street of which she was a part, to wander as he chose in strange continents, in exotic weathers, through time sequined with extravagant dawns and sunsets, through space jewelled with towns running red with blood of revolutions or multi-coloured with carnival. In every way he was richer than she was, for he had more joy in travelling than she would have had, since over the scenic world she saw there was cast for him a nexus of romance which she could not have perceived.

Everywhere he would meet men whom he had captained on desperate adventures, who over wine would point ringed fingers at mountain ranges and whisper of forgotten mines and tempt him to adventures that would take him away from her for ever so long. Everywhere he would meet women, hateful feminine women of the sort who are opposed to Woman Suffrage, who, because of some past courtesy of his, would throw him roses and try to make him watch their dancing feet. She sobbed with rage as she perceived how different from her the possession of this past made him. When he reached Rio he would not stand by the quiet bay as she would have stood, enraptured by the several noble darknesses of the sky, the mountains, and the ship-starred sea, but would go quickly to his house on the hill, not hurrying, but showing by a lightness in his walk, by a furtive vivacity of his body, that he was involved in some private system of exciting memories. He would open the wrought-iron gates with a key which she had not known he possessed, which had lain close to him in one of those innumerable pockets that men have in their clothes. With perfect knowledge of the path, he would step silently through the garden, where flowers run wild had lost their delicacy and grew as monstrous candelabra of coarsened blooms in soil greenly feculent with weeds; she rejoiced in its devastation. He would enter the hall and pick his steps between the pools of wine that lay black on the marble floor; he would tread on the rosettes of corruption that had once been garlands of roses hung about the bronze whale's neck; he would look down on the white limbs of the shattered Venus, and look up and listen to the creaking flight of the birds of prey that were nesting under the broken roof; and he would smile as if he shared a secret with the ruin and dissipation. His smile was the sun, but in it there was always a dark ray of secrecy. All his experience was a mockery of her inexperience. Her clenched fist beat her brow, which had become hot....

All that day her mind had painfully enacted such fantasies of hatred or had waited blankly for this moment which the old man's shuffling step was now bringing towards her. She braced herself, though she did not look up from the table.

"Nelly, I've brought you a bit rock from Ferguson's."

She gazed cannily at the white paper parcel. It was the largest box he had ever given her; he always gave her sweeties when Mr. Philip had been talking against her. Ought she therefore to deduce from the unusual size that he had been saying something unusually cruel? But, on the other hand, surely no one could ever give sweeties to a girl if they thought she had let herself be kissed. "You're just too kind, Mr. James," she said mournfully.

"Take out a stick and give me one. What for did I have false teeth put in at great expense if it was not that I might eat rock with my Nelly? I'll take a bit of the peppermint. My wife is a leddy and will not let me eat peppermint in my ain hoose." He always spoke to Ellen, he did not know why, in the same rough, soft, broad Scots tongue that he had talked with his mother and father when he was a wee boy in the carter's cottage on the Lang Whang of the Old Lanark Road, that he still talked to his cat in his little study at the back of his square, decent residence. "Ay, that's right. But lassie, what ails ye? You're looking at the box as though you'd taken a turn at the genteel and become an Episcopalian and it was Lent. If you've lost that fine sweet tooth of yours ye must be sickening for something."

"Och, me. I'm all right," said Ellen drearily, and picked a ginger stick, and bit it joylessly; and laid it down again, and pressed her hand to her heart. She hearkened to the racing beat of her agony with eyes grown remote and lips drawn down at the corner with disgust, like a woman feeling the movements of an unwanted child. And Mr. Mactavish James, was so wrung with pity for the wee thing, and the mature dignity with which she wore her misery, and the next moment so glowing with pleasure at himself for this generous emotion, that he beamed on her and purred silently, "Ech, the poor bairn! I will go straight to the point and make her mind easy." He wriggled into an easier position in his chair, readjusted his glasses, and settled down to enjoy this pleasant occupation of lifting the lid off her distress, stirring it up, and distilling from it and the drying juices of his heart more of this creditable pity.

"Nelly," he said jocosely, "I've been hearing tales about you."

She answered, "I know it. Mr. Philip has told me."

"Ay, I thought he would," said Mr. Mactavish James comfortably. He could also make a pretty good guess at the temper his son Philip had put into the telling. For he was an old man, and knew that a young man in love may not be the quiet, religious lover pondering how a minute's kissing under the moon can sanctify all the next day's daylight that the poets describe him. He may be inflamed out of youth's semblance by jealousy, and decide that since he has no claws to tear the female flesh as it deserves, he will do what he can with cruel words and treachery. It is just luck, the kind of man one happens to be born. Well, it was just luck....

"He's tremendous excited about seeing you and Mr. Yaverland, Nelly."

Her eyes were blue fire. "Och, 'twas him that saw me! He said it was a client."

He covered his mouth with his hand, but decided to give his son away. All his life he had been rejecting the claims of beauty and gentle things, and he could be sure that his well-brought-up family would go on doing it after he was in his grave. Over this one little point, which did not really matter, he could afford to be handsome. "Aye, 'twas Mr. Philip that saw you," he owned easily, and swerved his head before the long look, pansy-soft with gratitude, that she now turned on him. The girl was so inveterately inclined to dilate on the pleasant things of life that his generosity in admitting that his son was a liar, and thus assuring her that her shame had not been as public as she had supposed, quite wiped out all her other emotions. She fairly glowed about it; and at that the old man felt curiously ashamed, as if he had gained a child's prattling thanks by giving it a bad sixpence, although he could not see what he had done that was not all right. He rubbed his hands and tried to kindle a jollity by crying, "Well, what would I do but tell you? If I hadn't, ye'd have been running about distributing black eyes among my clients just on suspicion, ye fierce wee randy!"

"Och, you make fun of me—!" She smiled, palely, and gnawed the ginger stick, her jaw being so impeded by her desire to cry that she could not bite it.

"Poor bairn! Poor bairn!" he sighed, and his pity for the little thing seemed to him so moving, so completely in the vein of the best Scottish pathos, that he continued to gaze at her and enjoy his own emotion, until a wryness of her mouth made him fear that unless he hurried up and got to the point she would rush from the room and leave him without this delicious occupation. So he went on, speaking cosily. "I thought little of it. You are a good lassie, Nelly, and I can trust you. I know that fine. Sometimes I think it is a great peety that Philip was not born a wee girl, for he would have grown up into a fine maiden aunt. He is that particular about his sisters you would not believe. Though losh! he has no call for anxiety, for they're none of them bonny."

Ellen was pulling herself together, trying to take his lack of censure as a matter of course and choking back the tears of relief. "I'd not say that," she said in a strangled voice. "Miss Chrissie isn't so bad, though with those teeth I think she would be wiser to avoid looking arch. Och, Mr. James, what's come to you?" For he was rolling with a great groundswell of merriment, and slapping his thigh and chuckling. "The things the simplest woman can say! No need for practice in boodwars and draring-rooms! It comes natural!" She looked at him with wrinkled brows and smiling mouth, sure that he was not being unkind, but wondering why he laughed, and murmured, "Mr. James, Mr. James!" It flashed on her suddenly what he meant, and she jumped up from her seat and cried through exasperated laughter, "Och, men are mean things! I see what's in your mind! But indeed I did not intend to be catty! You must admit, though she's your own daughter, that Miss Chrissie's teeth are on the long side! That's all I meant. Och, Mr. James, I wish you would not be such a tease!" However, he continued to laugh bellyingly, and she started to run round the table as if to assail him with childish tuggings and shakings, but to leave her hands free she popped the ginger stick into her mouth like a cigarette, and was immediately distracted to gravity by important considerations. "What am I doing, eating ginger when I hate the stuff? I'll nip off the end I've been at and put it back for mother. She just loves it, dear knows why, the nasty hot thing. I'll have one of the pink ones. They've no great flavour, but I like the colour...."

While she bent over the box, her mind and fingers busy among the layers, the old man turned his bleared eyes upon her and wondered at her, and rejoiced in her variousness as he had not thought he would rejoice over a useless thing. For she had altered utterly in the last few seconds. When he had come into the room she had been a tiny cowering thing of soft piteous gazes and miserable silences, like a sick puppy, too sick to whimper; now she was almost soulless in her beauty and well-being, and as little a matter for pity as a daffodil in sunshine. She was completely, absorbedly young and greedy and happy. The fear that life was really horrid had obscured her bright colours like a cobweb, but now she was radiant again; it was as if a wind had blown through her hair, which always changed with her moods as a cat's coat changes with the weather, and had been lank since morning. He was not used to variable women. His two wives, Annie and Christian, had always looked much the same. He remembered that when he went in to see Aggie as she lay in her coffin he had examined her face very carefully because he had heard that people's faces altered when they were dead and fell into expressions that revealed the truth about their inner lives; but she did not seem to have changed at all, and was still looking sensible.

To keep the situation moving he drawled teasingly, "Och, you women, you women! Born with the tongues of cats you are, every one of ye, and with the advawnce of ceevilisation ye're developing the claws! There was a fine piece in the Scotsman this morning about one of your Suffragettes standing on the roof of a town hall and behaving as a wild cat would think shame to, skirling at Mr. Asquith through a skylight and throwing slates at the polis that came to fetch her. Aw, verra nice, verra ladylike, I'm sure."

"Well, why shouldn't she? Yon miserable Asquith—"

"Asquith's not miserable. He's a good man. He's an Englishman, but he sits for Fife."

"Anyway, it was Charlotte Marsh that did it. And if she's not a lady, who is? Her photograph's given away with this week's Votes for Women. She's a beautiful girl."

"I doubt it, Nelly."

"I'll bring the photo then!"

"Beautiful girls get married," said Mr. Mactavish James guilefully, watching for her temper to send up rockets. "What for is she not married if she is so beautiful?"

"Because she's more particular than your wife was!" barked Ellen, admitting reluctantly as he gasped and chuckled, "Yon's not my own. I heard Mary Gawthorpe say that at an open-air meeting. She is a wonder, yon wee thing. She has such a power of repartee that the interrupters have to be carried out on stretchers."

"Ah, ye're all impudent wee besoms thegither," said Mr. Mactavish James, and set his eyes wide on her face. From something throbbing in her speech he hoped that the spring of her distress had not yet run dry.

"Why are you not more respectful to the Suffragettes? You're polite enough to the Covenanters, and yet they fought and killed people, while we haven't killed even a policeman, though there's a constable in the Grange district whose jugular vein I would like fine to sever with my teeth for what he said to me when I was chalking pavements. If you don't admire us you shouldn't admire the Covenanters."

"The Covenanters were fighting for religion," he murmured, keeping his eyes on her face.

"So's this religion, and it's of some practical use, moreover," she answered listlessly. She drew her hands down her face, threw up her arms, and breathed a fatigued, shuddering sigh. The conversation had begun to seem to her intolerably insipid because they were not talking of Yaverland.

She rose to her feet, moved distractedly about the room, and then, with a purposefulness that put into his stare that terrified cold enmity with which the sane look upon even the beloved mad, she swept two rulers off her desk on to the floor. But she knelt down and set them cross-wise, and then straightened herself and crooked her arms above her head, and began to dance a sword-dance. Even her filial relations to him hardly justified such a puncture of office discipline, and he sat blowing at it until he saw that this was a new phase of her so entertaining misery. It is always absurd when that pert and ferocious dance, invented by an unsensuous race inordinately and mistakenly vain of its knees, is performed by a graceful girl; and Ellen added to that incongruity by dancing languorously, passionately. It was like hearing the wrong words sung to a familiar tune. And her face was at discord with both the dance and her performance of it, for she was fixedly regarding someone who was not there. "She is fey!" he thought tolerantly, and gloated over this fresh display of her unhappiness and his pity, though a corner of his mind was busy hoping that Mr. Morrison would not come in. It was unusual in Edinburgh for a solicitor (at any rate in a sound firm) to sit and watch his typist dancing.

But soon she stopped dancing. Her need to speak of Yaverland took away her breath.

She slouched across the room to the window, laid her cheek to the glass, and said rapidly, "It is bad weather. It is bad weather here an awful lot of the time. Mr. Yaverland says there is a place in Peru where it is always spring. That would be bonny." She felt relieved and warmed as soon as she had mentioned his name, and sat down easily in the window-seat and smiled back at the old man.

"Ehem! So this Mr. Yaverland has surveyed mankind from China to Peru, as the great Dr. Johnson says."

But she could not speak of Yaverland again so soon. She tried to make time by wrangling. "Why do you call him the great Dr. Johnson? He was just a rude old thing."

"He was a man of sense, lassie, a man of sense."

"What's sense?" she cried, and flung wide her arms. Her body pricked with a general emotion that was not relevant to the words she spoke, and indeed she was not quite aware what those were. "Sense isn't sitting in your chair all day and ruining the coats of your—of your digestion drinking too much tea and contradicting everybody and being rude to Mrs. Thrale when the poor body married again."

"It was a fule's marriage," said Mr. Mactavish James; "the widow of a substantial man taking up wi' an Italian fiddler."

"Marriage with one man's no worse than marriage with another, the way they all are," said Ellen darkly, and got back to her argument. "And hating the Scotch and democracy, and saying blunt foolish things as if they were blunt wise ones—that's not sense. And if it were, what's the good of living to be sensible? It's like living to have five fingers on your hand. And life's so short! Mr. James, does it never worry you dreadfully that life is so short? I wonder how we all bear up about it. One ought to live for adventure. I want to go away, right away. There are such lots of lovely places where there are palms, and people get romantically shot, and there's a town somewhere where poppies grow on the roofs of mosques. I would like to see that. And queer people—masked Touaregs—"

"Lassie, you are blethering," said Mr. Mactavish James, "this is a pairfect salad of foreign pairts."

It had to come out. "Mr. Yaverland says Peru is lovely. He has been both sides of the Andes. He liked Peru. There are silver mines at Iquique and etairnal spring at the place whose name I have forgotten. Funny that I should forget the name of the one place on airth where there is etairnal spring! If I had all the money in the world I would not be able to go there because I have forgotten its name!" She laughed sobbingly, and went on. "And he's been in Brazil. He lived for a time in Rio de Janeiro." She stared fixedly at her mental image of the fateful house where there was a broken statue on a bier, shook herself, and went on. "And he's travelled in the forest. He's seen streams covered with the big leaves of Victoria Regia like they have it in the Botanical Gardens, and egrets standing on the bank, and better there than in ladies' hats. I wonder if I would be a fool if I had the money?—if I would wear dead things on my head? But indeed there are ways I think I would always be nice, however rich I was—ways that don't affect me very much, so that they're no sacrifice. And he's seen lots of things. Sloths, which I always thought were just metaphors. And ant-eaters, and alligators, and jaguars. And—"

"If you go to London," said Mr. Mactavish James, "you'll be losing your heart to a keeper at the Zoo."

"Who's losing their heart to anybody?" she asked peevishly. "And you needn't sneer. He's done lots else besides just seeing animals. Once he steered a ship in the South Seas for two days and two nights when the crew were down with the New Guinea fever. And another time he was working at a mine in Andalusia. The miners went on strike. He and some other men put up barricades and took guns. They defended the place. He is the first man I have ever known who did such things. And they come natural to him. He thinks no more of them than your son," she said nastily, "thinks of playing a round on the Gullane links."

"Imphm. I wonder what he's been doing traiking about like this. Rolling stones gather no moss, I've heard."

Her eyes blazed, then narrowed. "Oh, make no mistake! He earns a lot of money. He can beat you even at your own game."

Mr. Mactavish James tee-heed, but did not like it, for she was looking round the room as if it were a hated prison and all that was done in it contemptible; and these things were his life. "Well, you know best. And what's this paragon like? I've not seen the fellow."

"He's a lovely pairson," she said sullenly.

He began to loathe these two young people, who were all that he and his stock could not be, who were going to do the things his age could not do. "Ah, well! Ah, well!" he sighed, with a spurious shrewd melancholy. "He'll be like me when he's old, Ellen; all old men are alike."

She looked at him coldly and said, "He will not."

Her brows were heavy and the hand she held at her bosom was clenched. The rain was beating on the window-panes. The fire seemed diluted by the day's dampness; and there was a chill spreading through his mind as if they had been debating fundamental things and the argument had turned unanswerably to his disadvantage. He twisted in his seat and looked sharply at her, and though the mirror of his mind was apt to tilt away from the disagreeable, he perceived that she was regarding him and the prudent destiny he had chosen with a scorn more unappeasable than any appetite; and that the destiny she was choosing with this snarling intensity was so glorious that it justified her scorn. He felt a conviction, which had the vague quality of melancholy, that he was morally insolvent, and a suspicion, which had the acute quality of pain, that his financial solvency was not such a great thing after all. For Ellen looked like an angry queen as well as an angry angel. It seemed possible that these young people were not only going to have a mansion in heaven, but would have a large house on earth as well, and these two establishments made his single establishment in Moray Place seem not so satisfactory as he had always thought it. These people were going to take their fill of beauty and delight and all the unchafferable things he had denied himself that he might pursue success, and they were going to take their fill of success too! It was not fair. He thought of their good fortune in being born strong and triumphant as if it were a piece of rapacity, and tried to wriggle out of this moment which compelled him to regard them with respect by reversing the intentional, enjoyed purity of relationship with her and finding a lewd amusement in the fierceness which was so plainly an aspect of desire. But that meant moving outside the orbit of dignity; and he knew that when a man does that he gives himself for ever into the hands of those who behold him. So he worked back to the position of the rich, kind old man stooping to protect the little helpless working-girl.

He pushed the box of sweets across the table, and said in a tender and offended voice, "You're not eating your sweets, Nelly. I hoped to give you pleasure when I bought them."

One would always get her that way.

Someone was being hurt. Immediately she had the soft breast of the dove. "Oh, Mr. James!"

"I wish I could give you more pleasure," he went on. "But there! I've been able to do little enough for you. Well do I know it"

"You've done a lot for me. You've been so good."

"It's a pity we should have fallen out over a stranger. But I know I am too free with my tongue."

"Oh, Mr. James!"

"Never mind, lassie. I'm only an old man, and you're young; you must go your own way—"

"Oh, Mr. James!" She rose and ran round the table to his side; and at the close sight of her, excited and yet muted with pity, brilliant as sunset but soft as light rain, the honest thing in him forgot the spurious scene he was carpentering. He exclaimed solemnly, "Nelly, you are very beautiful."

She was startled. "Me, beautiful?"

"Aye," he said, "beautiful."

For a moment she pondered over it almost stupidly. Then she put her hand on Mr. James's shoulder and shook him; now that her sexual feelings were focussed on one man she treated all other men with a sexless familiarity that to those who did not understand might have seemed shameless and a little mad. "Am I beautiful?" she asked searchingly.

"How many times do you want me to say it?" he said.

"But how beautiful?" she pursued. "Like a picture in the National Gallery? Or like one of those actresses? Now isn't that a queer thing? I'm all for art as a general thing, but I'd much rather be like an actress. Tell me, which am I like?"

"You're like both. That's where you score."

She caught her breath with a sob. "You're not laughing at me?"

"Get up on your chair and look in the glass over the mantelpiece."

She stepped up, and with a flush and a raising of the chin as if she were doing something much more radical than looking in a mirror, as if, indeed, she were stripping herself quite naked, she faced her image.

"You've never looked at yourself before," said the old man.

"'Deed I have," she snapped. "How do you think I put my hat on straight?"

"It never is," he retorted, and repeated grimly and exultingly, "You've never looked at yourself before."

She looked obliquely at her reflection and ran her hands ashamedly up and down her body, and tried for a word and failed.

"Are you not beautiful?" he said.

"Imphm. There's no denying I'm effective," she admitted tartly, and stepped down and stood for a moment shivering as if she had done something distasteful. And then climbed on to the chair again. "In evening dress, like the one Sarah Bernhardt wore in La Dame aux Camélias, I dare say I could look all right with a fan—a big fan of ostrich feathers." This time she faced the image directly and almost gloatingly, as if it were food. "But considering my circumstances, that is a wild hypothesis. I suppose ... I ... am ... all right. But I suppose I'm just good-looking for a private person. I'd look the plainest of the plain beside Zena or Phyllis Dare. Would I not? Would I not?"

"You'd look plain beside no one but Venus," said Mr. Mactavish James, "and her you'd better with your tongue."

"Ah!" She breathed deeply, as if at last she drank. "So it doesn't matter my chin being so wee? I've always hankered after a chin like Carson's. I think it makes one looked up to, irrespective of one's merits. But if what you say is true I've no call to worry. I'll do as I am." She shot an intense scowling glance at the old man. "You're sure I'll do?"

"Ay, lass, you'll do," he answered gravely.

She burst into a light peal of laughter, as different from her usual mirth as if she had been changed from gold to silver. "Oh dear! Oh dear!" she cried, her voice suddenly high-pitched and femininely gay. "What nonsense we're talking! Do—for what? It's all pairfectly ridiculous—as if looks mattered one way or another!" An animation of so physical a nature had come on her that her heart was beating almost too quickly for speech, and her body, being uncontrolled by her spirit, abandoned itself to entirely uncharacteristic gestures which were but abstract designs drawn by her womanhood. She lifted her face towards the mirror and pouted her lips mockingly, as if she knew that some spirit buried in its glassy depths desired to kiss them and could not. She stood on her toes on the hard wooden seat, so that it looked as if she were wearing high heels, and her hands, which were less like paws than they had ever been before, because she was holding them with consciousness of her fingers' extreme length, took the skirt of her frock and pulled it into panniers. She wished that she were clad in silk! But that lent no wistfulness to her face, which now glittered with a solemn and joyful rapacity, for her unconscious being had divined that there were before her many victories to be gained wholly without sweat of the will. "Ah!" she sighed, and wondered at her over-contentment; and then went on with her delicate shrill chatter, glowing and holding herself with a fine frivolity that made it seem almost as if she were clad in silk, and passing from flowerlike loveliness to loveliness.

"It's a pity Mr. Yaverland cannot see you now," said the old man, half from honest jocosity and half from an itch to bring the creature back to this interesting suffering of hers.

Gasping with laughter, though she kept her eyes gravely and steadily on her beauty, she answered, "Yes, it is a pity! It is a great pity! He's very handsome too, you know. We'd make a bonny pair! Oh dear, oh dear!"

Mr. James sat up. "What's that? What is it you're saying? Hec, you're talking of making a pair, are you?" Amusement always made his voice sound gross. "Has he asked you to marry him then, ye shy wee besom?"

She swung round on her toes, her face magic with passion and mischief. "Give me time, Mr. James, give me time!" she cried, and her head fell back on her long white throat, while her laughter jetted in shaking, shy, thin gusts like a blackbird's song. And then she ceased. Her head fell forward. Her gown dropped from her outstretched hands, which she pressed against her bosom. A second past she had filled with spring this office damp with autumn; now she made it more asperous and grey than had November, for her season had changed to the extremest winter. She pressed her hands so hard against her breast and in a voice weak as if she were very cold she said, "Oh, God! Oh, God!"

"Eh!" gaped Mr. James.

She had made a fool of herself. She had said dreadful things. She had boasted about something that could not come true, that would be horrible if it did. Her face became chalk white with such agony as only the young can feel.

Mr. James's gouty leg crackled out pains as he tried to rise, and he had to sink back in his chair and look up at her through the vibrating silence, whispering, "Nelly, my dear lass."

At that she shot at him such a cold sidelong glance as one might shoot at a stranger who has let one know that he has overheard an intimacy, and with movements at once clumsy and precise she got down from her chair and put it back at the table. She stood quite still, with her hands resting on it, her face assuming a mean and shrewish expression. She was remembering a woman who had been rude to her mother, a schoolfellow of Mrs. Melville's, who had married as well as she had married badly, and had allowed consciousness of that fact to colour her manner when they had run against each other in Princes Street. Ellen was trying to imitate the expression by which this bourgeoise had given her mother to understand that the interview need not long be continued. She caught it, she thought, but it did not really help. There was still this pressure of a flood of tears behind her eyes. She looked out of the window and exclaimed, "It's getting dark!" She said it peevishly, as if the sun's descent was the last piece of carelessness on the part of a negligent universe. And as her eye explored the dusk and saw that the bright spheres round the lamps were infested by wandering ghosts of wind-blown humidity she thought of her walk home up the Mound and what it would be like on this night of gusts and damp. "That puts the lid on!" her heart said bitterly, and the first tears oozed. Somehow she must go at once. She said thinly and quaveringly, "It's getting dark. Surely it's time I was away home?"

There was a clock on the mantelpiece which told it was not yet half-past four, but they both looked away from it. "Ay," said Mr. Mactavish James cheerfully, "you must run away home. I'll not have it said I drive a bairn to death with late hours. Good evening, lassie." He was so terrified by the intensity of her emotion that he had given up playing his fish. There stabbed a question through his heart. Had Isabella Kingan suffered thus?

"Good evening, Mr. James," she said brightly, and went out into the hall letting the door swing to, and pulled on her coat and tam-o'-shanter in the darkness. Now that it did not matter if she cried, she did not feel nearly so much like crying. "That's the way things always are," she snorted, and began to hum the Marseillaise defiantly as she buttoned up her coat. But though she was not seen here, she was not alone. There pressed against her the unexpungeable fact of her disgrace. Her eyes, mad with distress, with too much weeping, printed on the blackness the figure of the man with whom she had associated herself in this awful way by that idiot capering before the glass, by those maniac words. With rapture and horror she saw his dark-lidded eyes with their brilliant yet secretive gaze, the lips that were parted yet not loose, that his reserve would not permit to close lest by their setting strangers should see whether he was smiling or moody; she remembered the bluish bloom that had been on his chin the first night she ever saw him. At that she brought her clenched fist down on her other palm and sobbed with hate. He had brought all this upon her.

And hearing that, Mr. Mactavish James hobbled towards the door, purring endearments. He was better now. That anguished melody of speculation as to Isabella Kingan's heart he had played over again with the tempo rubato and the pressed loud pedal of sentimentality, and it was now no more than agreeably affecting as a Scotch song ... being kind to the wean for the sake of her who was my sweethairt in auld lang syne....

She was so blind with hate of Yaverland that she was not aware of his presence till he bent over her, whinneying in the slow, complacent accents of Scottish sentiment, "Nelly, Nelly, what ails ye, lassie? Nothing's happened! I'll put it all right."

"Yes, of course nothing's happened!" she snapped, her hand on the doorknob. "Who said it had?" And then his words, "I'll put it all right," began to torment her. They threatened her that her disgrace was not to end here, that he might talk about it, that the thing might well be with her to her grave, that she had done for herself, that now and forever she had made her life not worth living. "Och, away with it!" she almost screamed. "You've driven me so that I don't know what I'm doing, you and your nasty wee black poodle of a son!"

He had to laugh. "Nelly, Nelly, he's as God made him!"

"Ye shelve your responsibility!" she said, and breaking immediately into the bitterest tears of this long day of weeping, flung out of the door of this loathed place, to which she remembered with agony as she ran down the stairs she must return to-morrow to earn her living.