The room seemed to contract and break out into soiled pink valances.  He put down his glass, groaned, and made his mind blank, and was immediately revisited by the thought of Ellen’s face on her spilt red hair.  An ingenious thought struck him, and he hurried from the room.  He met one of his sisters in the passage, and said, “Away, I want to speak to father.”  It was true that she was not preventing him from doing so, but the gesture of dominance over the female gave him satisfaction.

There was a little study at the back of the house which was lined from top to bottom with soberly bound and unrecent books, and dominated by a bust of Sir Walter Scott supported on a revolving bookcase which contained the Waverley Novels, Burns’ Poems, and Chambers’ Dictionary, which had an air of having been put there argumentatively, as a manifesto of the Scottish view that intellect is their local industry.  Here, in a fog of tobacco smoke, Mr. Mactavish James reclined like a stranded whale, reading the London Law Journal and breathing disparagingly through both mouth and nose at once, as he always did when in contact with the English mind.  He did not look up when Mr. Philip came in, but indicated by a “Humph!” that he was fully aware of the entrance.  There was an indefinable tone in this grunt which made Mr. Philip wonder whether he had not been overmuch influenced in seeking this interview by the conventional view of the parental relationship.  He sometimes suspected that his father regarded him with accuracy, rather than with the indulgence that fathers habitually show to their only sons.  But he went at it.

“Father, you’ll have to speak to yon Melville girl.”

Mr. Mactavish James did not raise his eyes, but enquired with the faintest threat of mockery, “What’s she been doing to you, Philip?”

“She’s not been doing anything to me.  What could she do?  But I’ve just seen her in Princes Street with yon fellow Yaverland, the client from Rio.  They were coming out of the station and they took a cab.”

“What for should they not?”

“You can’t have a typist prancing about with clients at this time of night.”

“It’s airly yet,” said Mr. Mactavish James mildly, continuing to turn over the pages of the Law Journal.  “We’ve not had our dinners yet.  Though from the way the smell of victuals is roaring up the back stairs we shouldn’t be long.”

“Father, people were looking at them.  They—­they were holding hands.”  He forced himself to believe the lie.  “You can’t have her carrying on like that with clients.  It’ll give the office a bad name.”

At last his father raised his eyes, which, though bleared with age, were still the windows of a sceptical soul, and let them fall.  “Ellen is a good girl, Philip,” he said.