Through this gaping at the client from Rio she had missed the chairman’s speech.  Dr. Munro had just sat down.  Her sensible square face looked red and stern, as though she had just been obliged to smack someone, and from the tart brevity of the applause it was evident that that was what she had been doing.  This rupture of the bright occasion struck Ellen, who found herself suddenly given over to irritations, as characteristic of the harshness of Edinburgh life.  Here was a cause so beautiful in its affirmation of freedom that it should have been served only by the bravery of dignified women and speeches lucent with reason and untremulously spoken, by things that would require no change of quality but only rearrangements to be instantly commemorable by art; and yet this Scotch woman, moving with that stiffness of the mental joints which nations which suffer from it call conscientiousness, had managed to turn a sacramental gathering of the faithful into a steamy short-tempered activity, like washing-day.  “Think shame on yourself, Ellen Melville!” she rebuked herself.  “She’s a better woman than ever you’ll be, with the grand work she’s done at the Miller’s Wynd Dispensary.”  But that the doctor was a really fine woman made the horsehair texture of her manner all the more unpleasing, for it showed her sinisterly illustrative of a community which had reached an intellectual standard that could hardly be bettered and which possessed certain moral energy, and yet was content to be rude.  Amongst these people Ellen felt herself, with her perpetual tearful desire that everybody should be nice, to be a tenuous and transparent thing.  She doubted if she would ever be able to contend with such as they.  “Maybe I shall not get on after all!” she thought, and her heart turned over with fear.

But Mrs. Ormiston was speaking now.  Oh, it was treason to complain against the world when it held anything so fine as this!  She stood very far forward on the platform, and it seemed as though she had no friends in the world but did not care.  Beauty was hers, and her white face, with its delicate square jaw and rounded temples, recalled the pansy by its shape.  She wore a dress of deep purple, that colour which is almost a sound, an emotion, which is seen by the mind’s eye when one hears great music.  Her hoarse, sweet North-country voice rushed forth like a wind bearing the sounds of a battlefield, the clash of arms, the curses hurled at an implacable and brutish enemy, the sights of the dying—­for already some had died; and with a passion that preserved her words from the common swift mortality of spoken things she told stories of her followers’ brave deeds which seemed to remain in the air and deck the hall like war-tattered standards.  She spoke of the women who were imprisoned at Birmingham for interrupting Mr. Asquith’s meeting, and how they lay now day and night in the black subterranean prison cells, huddled on the tree-stumps that were the only seats,