"We had a great press of business and I had to stay," said Ellen with masculine nonchalance. "A most interesting client came in...."
CHAPTER II
I
Every Saturday afternoon Ellen sold Votes for Women in Princes Street, and the next day found her as usual with a purple, white and green poster hung from her waist and a bundle of papers tucked under her arm. This street-selling had always been a martyrdom to her proud spirit, for it was one of the least of her demands upon the universe that she should be well thought of eternally and by everyone; but she had hitherto been sustained by the reflection that while there were women in jail, as there were always in those days, it ill became her to mind because Lady Cumnock (and everyone knew what she was, for all that she opened so many bazaars) laughed down her long nose as she went by. But now Ellen had lost all her moral stiffening, and as that had always been her specialty she was distressed by the lack; she felt like a dress-shirt that a careless washerwoman had forgotten to starch. The giggling of the passers-by and the manifest unpopularity of her opinions pricked her to tears, and she mournfully perceived that she had ceased to be a poet. For that the day was given over to a high melancholy of grey clouds, which did not let the least stain of weak autumn sunlight discolour the black majesty of the Castle Rock, and that a bold wind played with the dull clothes of the Edinburgh folk and swelled them out into fantastic shapes like cloaks carried by grandees, were as nothing to her because the hurricane tore the short ends of her hair from under her hat and made them straggle on her forehead. "I doubt if I'll be able to appreciate Keats if this goes on," she meditated gloomily. And the people that went by, instead of being as usual mere provocation for her silent laughter, had to-day somehow got power over her and tormented her by making her suspect the worthlessness of her errand. It seemed the height of folly to work for the race if the race was like this: men who, if they had dignity, looked cold and inaccessible to fine disastrous causes; men who were without dignity and base as monkeys; mountainous old men who looked bland because the crevices of their expressions had been filled up with fat, but who showed in the glares they gave her and her papers an immense expertness in coarse malice; hen-like genteel women with small mouths and mean little figures that tried for personality with trimmings and feather boas and all other adornments irrelevant to the structure of the human body; flappers who swung scarlet bows on their plaits and otherwise assailed their Presbyterian environment by glad cries of the appearance; and on all these faces the smirk of superior sagacity that vulgar people give to the untriumphant ideal. "I must work out the ethics of suicide this evening," thought Ellen chokingly, "for if the world's like this it's the wisest thing to do. But not, of course, until mother's gone."
She mechanically offered a paper to a passing flapper, who rejected it with a scornful exclamation, "'Deed no, Ellen Melville! I think you're mad." Ellen recognised her as a despised schoolfellow and gnashed her teeth at being treated like this by a poor creature who habitually got thirty per cent, in her arithmetic examination. "Mad, am I? Not so mad as you, my dear, thinking you look like Phyllis Dare with yon wee, wee pigtail. You evidently haven't realised that a Scotch girl can't help looking sensible. That graceful butterfly frivolity that comes so easy to the English, and, I've haird, the French, is not for us. I think it's something about our ankles that prevents us." She looked at the girl's feet, said "Ay!" in a manner that hinted that they confirmed her theory, and turned away, remarking over her shoulder, "Mind you, I admire your spirit, setting out to look like one of these light English actresses when your name's Davidina Todd." The wind was trying to tear the poster from the cord that held it to her waist, the cold was making her sniff, and as she gave her back to this flimsy little fool she caught sight of a minister standing a yard or two away and giggling "Tee hee!" at her. It was too much. She darted down on him. "Are you not Mr. Hunter of the Middleton Place United Free Church?" she asked, making her voice sound soft and cuddly.
He wiped the facetiousness from his face and assented with a polite bob. Perhaps she was the daughter of an elder. Quite nice people were taking up this nonsense.
"I heard you preach last Sunday," she said, glowing with interest. He began to look coy. Then her voice changed to something colder than the wind. "The most lamentable sairmon I ever listened to. Neither lairning nor inspiration. And a read sairmon, too."
As his black back threaded through the traffic remorse fell upon her. "Here's an opportunity for doing quiet, uncomplaining service to the Cause," she reproached herself, "and I'm turning it into a fair picnic for my tongue." Everyone was rubbish, and she herself was no exception. Her hair was nearly down. And she had to stay there for another hour.
But she determined to endure it; and Richard Yaverland, who afar off had formed the intention of stopping and speaking to the girl with the poster because she had such hair, was suddenly reminded by the comic and romantic quality of her attitude that this was the typist he had met on the previous evening, whose manifest discontent and ambition had come into his mind more than once during his sleepless night and had distressed him until some recollected gesture or accent made him laugh. He slightly resented this recognition and the change it worked on his emotional tone. For he was compelled to think of her as a human being and be sorry because she was plainly cold and miserable; and it was his desire to look on women with a magpie thievish eye and no concern for their souls. Considering the part that most of them played in life it was unwarrantable of them to have souls. The dinner that one eats does not presume to have a soul. But the happy freedom of the voluptuary was not for him; against his will there lived in him something sombre and kind that was sensitive to spiritual things and despondent but powerfully vigilant about the happiness of other people. He said to himself, "That little girl is pretty well done up. She's nearly crying. Someone must have been rude to her." (He did not know his Ellen yet.) "I must give her a moment to get her poor little face straight." So until he drew level with her his dark eyes were fixed on the Castle Rock.