“I doubt it, Nelly.”

“I’ll bring the photo then!”

“Beautiful girls get married,” said Mr. Mactavish James guilefully, watching for her temper to send up rockets.  “What for is she not married if she is so beautiful?”

“Because she’s more particular than your wife was!” barked Ellen, admitting reluctantly as he gasped and chuckled, “Yon’s not my own.  I heard Mary Gawthorpe say that at an open-air meeting.  She is a wonder, yon wee thing.  She has such a power of repartee that the interrupters have to be carried out on stretchers.”

“Ah, ye’re all impudent wee besoms thegither,” said Mr. Mactavish James, and set his eyes wide on her face.  From something throbbing in her speech he hoped that the spring of her distress had not yet run dry.

“Why are you not more respectful to the Suffragettes?  You’re polite enough to the Covenanters, and yet they fought and killed people, while we haven’t killed even a policeman, though there’s a constable in the Grange district whose jugular vein I would like fine to sever with my teeth for what he said to me when I was chalking pavements.  If you don’t admire us you shouldn’t admire the Covenanters.”

“The Covenanters were fighting for religion,” he murmured, keeping his eyes on her face.

“So’s this religion, and it’s of some practical use, moreover,” she answered listlessly.  She drew her hands down her face, threw up her arms, and breathed a fatigued, shuddering sigh.  The conversation had begun to seem to her intolerably insipid because they were not talking of Yaverland.

She rose to her feet, moved distractedly about the room, and then, with a purposefulness that put into his stare that terrified cold enmity with which the sane look upon even the beloved mad, she swept two rulers off her desk on to the floor.  But she knelt down and set them cross-wise, and then straightened herself and crooked her arms above her head, and began to dance a sword-dance.  Even her filial relations to him hardly justified such a puncture of office discipline, and he sat blowing at it until he saw that this was a new phase of her so entertaining misery.  It is always absurd when that pert and ferocious dance, invented by an unsensuous race inordinately and mistakenly vain of its knees, is performed by a graceful girl; and Ellen added to that incongruity by dancing languorously, passionately.  It was like hearing the wrong words sung to a familiar tune.  And her face was at discord with both the dance and her performance of it, for she was fixedly regarding someone who was not there.  “She is fey!” he thought tolerantly, and gloated over this fresh display of her unhappiness and his pity, though a corner of his mind was busy hoping that Mr. Morrison would not come in.  It was unusual in Edinburgh for a solicitor (at any rate in a sound firm) to sit and watch his typist dancing.

But soon she stopped dancing.  Her need to speak of Yaverland took away her breath.