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.”