with her charm.  And he was speaking ill of her.  That she knew from Mr. Mactavish James’s kindnesses, which brightened the moment but always made the estimate of her plight more dreary, since just so might a gaoler in a brigand’s cave bring a prisoner scraps of sweeter food and drink when the talk of her death and the thought of her youth had made him feel tenderly.  Only that morning he had padded up behind Ellen and set a white parcel by her typewriter.  “Here’s some taiblet for you, lassie,” he had said, and had laid a loving, clumsy hand on her shoulder.  What had Mr. Philip been saying now?  And she did so want to be well spoken of.  But there was worse than that—­something so bad that she would not allow her mind to harbour any visual image of it, but thought of it in a harsh, short sentence. "When Mr. Morrison went out of the room and we were left alone he got up and set the door ajar...." Something weak and little in her cried out, “Oh, God, stop Mr. Philip being so cruel to me or I shall die!” and something fiercer said, “I will kill him....”

There was a roar of applause, and she found that Mrs. Ormiston had finished her speech.  This was another iniquity to be charged against Mr. Philip.  The thought of him had robbed her of heaven knows how much of the wisdom of her idol, and it might be a year or more before Mrs. Ormiston came to Edinburgh again.  She could have cried as she clapped, but fortunately there was Mrs. Mark Lyle yet to speak.  She watched the advance to the edge of the platform of that tall, beautiful figure in the shining dress which it would have been an understatement to call sky-blue, unless one predicated that the sky was Italian, and rejoiced that nature had so appropriately given such a saint a halo of gold hair.  Then came the slow, clear voice building a crystal bridge of argument between the platform and the audience, and formulating with an indignation that was fierce, yet left her marmoreal, an indictment against the double standard of morality and the treatment of unmarried mothers.

Ellen clapped loudly, not because she had any great opinion of unmarried mothers, whom she suspected of belonging to the same type of woman who would start on a day’s steamer excursion and then find that she had forgotten the sandwiches, but because she was a neat-minded girl and could not abide the State’s pretence that an illegitimate baby had only one parent when everybody knew that every baby had really two.  And she fell to wondering what this thing was that men did to women.  There was certainly some definite thing.  Children, she was sure, came into the world because of some kind of embrace; and she had learned lately, too, that women who were very poor sometimes let men do this thing to them for money:  such were the women whom she saw in John Square, when she came back late from a meeting or a concert, leaning against the garden-railings, their backs to the lovely nocturnal mystery of groves and moonlit lawns, and