‘You canna know. But I’m thinking I would have called to mind that she was a poor woman, and ailing, and terrible windy about her cloak, and I would just have said it was a beauty and that I wished I had one like it.’
‘Yes, I am certain that is what you would have done. But oh, mother, that is just how Jess would have acted if some poorer woman than she had shown her a new shawl.’
‘Maybe, but though I hadna boasted about my silk I would have wanted to do it.’
‘Just as Jess would have been fidgeting to show off her eleven and a bit!’
It seems advisable to jump to another book; not to my first, because—well, as it was my first there would naturally be something of my mother in it, and not to the second, as it was my first novel and not much esteemed even in our family. (But the little touches of my mother in it are not so bad.) Let us try the story about the minister.
My mother’s first remark is decidedly damping. ‘Many a time in my young days,’ she says, ‘I played about the Auld Licht manse, but I little thought I should live to be the mistress of it!’
‘But Margaret is not you.’
‘N-no, oh no. She had a very different life from mine. I never let on to a soul that she is me!’
‘She was not meant to be you when I began. Mother, what a way you have of coming creeping in!’
‘You should keep better watch on yourself.’