Baubie Wishart listened with outward calmness and seeming acquiescence to the comparison instituted between herself and her neighbor.  Inwardly, however, she raged.  What about knitting?  Anybody could knit.  She would like to see the lassie Grant earn two shillings of a Saturday night singing in the High street or the Lawnmarket.  Baubie forgot in her flush of triumphant recollection that there had always been somebody to take the two shillings from her, and beat her and accuse her of malversation and embezzlement into the bargain.  Artist-like, she remembered her triumphs only:  she could earn two shillings by her braced of songs, and for a minute, as she revelled in this proud consciousness, her face lost its demure, watchful expression, and the old independent, confident bearing reappeared.  Baubie forgot also in her present well-nourished condition the never-failing sensation of hunger that had gone hand in hand with these departed glories.  But even if she had remembered every circumstance of her former life, and the privations and sufferings, she would still have pined for its freedom.

The consequence of her being well fed was simply that her mind was freed from what is, after all, the besetting occupation of creatures like her, and was therefore at liberty to bestow its undivided attention upon the restraints and irksomeness of this new order of things.  Her gypsy blood began to stir in her:  the charm of her old vagabond habits asserted itself under the wincey frock and clean apron.  To be commended for knitting and sewing was no distinction worth talking about.  What was it compared with standing where the full glare of the blazing windows of some public-house fell upon the Rob Roy tartan, with an admiring audience gathered round and bawbees and commendations flying thick?  She never thought then, any more than now, of the cold wind or the day-long hunger.  It was no wonder that under the influence of these cherished recollections “white seam” did not progress and the knitting never attained to the finished evenness of the lassie Grant’s performance.

None the less, although she made no honest effort to equal this model proposed for her example, did Baubie feel jealous and aggrieved.  Her nature recognized other possibilities of expression and other fields of excellence beyond those afforded by the above-mentioned useful arts, and she brooded over her arbitrary and forcedly inferior position with all the intensity of a naturally masterful and passionate nature.  It was all the more unbearable because she had no real cause of complaint:  had she been oppressed or ill-treated in the slightest degree, or had anybody else been unduly favored, there would have been a pretext for an outbreak or a shadow of a reason for her discontent.  But it was not so.  The matron dispensed even-handed justice and motherly kindness impartially all round.  And if the lassie Grant’s excellences were somewhat obtrusively contrasted with Baubie’s shortcomings, it was because, the two children being of the same age, Mrs. Duncan hoped to rouse thereby a spark of emulation in Baubie.  Neither was there any pharisaical self-exaltation on the part of the rival.  She was a sandy-haired little girl, an orphan who had been three years in the refuge, and who in her own mind rather deprecated as unfair any comparison drawn between herself and the newly-caught Baubie.