give a rest to the minds of young people, who, goodness knows, have enough to worry them, by being easily comprehensible.  With mother one knew exactly where one was; one knew everything that had happened to her and how she had felt about it, and there was no question of anything fresh ever happening to her.  But from the deep, slow breaths this woman drew, from the warmth that seemed to radiate from her, from those purring murmurs which were evidently the sounds of a powerful mental engine running slow, it was plain that she was still possessed of that vitality which makes people perform dramas.  And everything about her threatened that her performances would be too strange.

She had a proof of that when the taxi turned out of a busy street into a brilliantly lit courtyard and halted behind another cab, suspending her in a scene that deserved to be gaped at because it was so definitely not Edinburgh.  The air of the little quadrangle was fairly dense with the yellowed rays of extravagant light, and the walls were divided not into shops and houses, but into allegorical panels representing pleasure.  They had stopped outside a florist’s, in whose dismantled window a girl in black stretched out a long arm towards the last vase of chrysanthemums, which pressed against the glass great curled polls almost as large as her own head.  It was impossible to imagine a Scotswoman practising so felinely elastic an attitude before the open street, or possessing a face so ecstatic with pertness, or finding herself inside a dress which, though black, disclaimed all intention of being mourning and sought rather, in its clinging economy, to be an occasion of public rejoicing.

Inconceivable, too, in Edinburgh, the place beside it, where behind plate glass walls, curtained with flimsy brise-bises that were as a ground mist, men and women ate and drank under strong lights with a divine shamelessness.  It couldn’t happen up there.  There were simply not the people to do it.  It might be tried at first; but because middle-aged men would constantly turn to middle-aged women and say, “Catch me bringing you here again, Elspeth.  It’s a nice thing to have your dinner with every Tom, Dick and Harry in the street watching every mouthful you take,” and because young men would as constantly have turned to young women with the gasp, “I’m sure I saw father passing,” it would have been a failure.  But here it was a success.  The sight was like loud, frivolous music.  And on the other side there was a theatre with steps leading up to a glittering bow-front, and a dark wall spattered with the white squares of playbills, under which a queue of people watched with happy and indifferent faces a ragged reciter whose burlesque extravagance of gesture showed that one was now in a country more tolerant of nonsense than the North.