and met the full force of the east wind, and then pulled themselves upright and butted at it afresh with dour faces.  The spectacle evoked a certain local pride, for such inclemencies were just part of the asperity of conditions which she reckoned as the price one had to pay for the dignity of living in Edinburgh; which indeed gave it its dignity, since to survive anything so horrible proved one good rough stuff fit to govern the rest of the world.  But chiefly it evoked desolation.  For she knew none of these people.  In all the town there was nobody but her mother who was at all aware of her.  It was six months since she left John Thompson’s Ladies’ College in John Square, so by this time the teachers would barely remember that she had been strong in Latin and mathematics but weak in French, and they were the only adult people who had ever heard her name.  She wanted to be tremendously known as strong in everything by personalities more glittering than these.  Less than that would do:  just to see people’s faces doing something else than express resentment at the east wind, to hear them say something else than “Twopence” to the tram-conductor.  Perhaps if one once got people going there might happen an adventure which, even if one had no part in it, would be a spectacle.  It was seventeen years since she had first taken up her seat in the world’s hall (and it was none too comfortable a seat), but there was still no sign of the concert beginning.

“Yet, Lord, I’ve a lot to be thankful for!” breathed Ellen.  She had this rich consciousness of her surroundings, a fortuitous possession, a mere congenital peculiarity like her red hair or her white skin, which did the girl no credit.  It kept her happy even now, when from time to time she had to lick up a tear with the point of her tongue, on the thin joy of the twilight.

Really the world was very beautiful.  She fell to thinking of those Saturdays that she and her mother, in the days when she was still at school, had spent on the Firth of Forth.  Very often, after Mrs. Melville had done her shopping and Ellen had made the beds, they packed a basket with apples and sandwiches (for dinner out was a terrible price) and they took the tram down the south spurs to Leith or Grantown to find a steamer.  Each port was the dwelling-place of romance.  Leith was a squalid pack of black streets that debouched on a high brick wall delightfully surmounted by mast-tops, and from every door there flashed the cutlass gleam of the splendid sinister.  Number 2, Sievering Street, was an opium den.  It was a corner house with Nottingham lace curtains and a massive brown door that was always closed.  You never would have known it, but that was what it was.  And once Ellen and her mother had come back late and were taking a short cut through the alleys to the terminus of the Edinburgh trams (one saved twopence by not taking the Leith trams and had a sense of recovering the cost of the expedition), and were