It seemed a courageous little city as it lay at the base of the towering black and silver Northern night:  a brave kindling of comfort in the midst of the indifferent universe.  And Ellen’s shopping manner, her east wind descent on salesmen, showed that she participated in the hardy quality of her surroundings.  In the first shop she was still too much aware of him to get into her stride.  It was a bakery—­such a marvellously stocked bakery as could be found only in the land of that resourceful people, which, finding itself too poor to have bread and circuses, set about to make a circus of its bread.  She bought a shepherd’s bap, its pale smooth crust velvety with white flour, and an iced cake that any other nation would have thought prodigious save for a wedding or a christening, while she smiled deprecatingly at him, as though she felt these were mawkish foods to be buying in the company of a friend of bruisers.  But in the butcher’s shop the Saturday night fever seized her, and presently Yaverland, who had been staring at a bullock’s carcase and liking the lovely springing arch of the ribs, was startled to hear her cry, “Mr. Lawson, you surprise me!” But it was only the price of a piece of a neck of mutton that had surprised her.  After that he listened to the conversation that passed between her and the shopmen, and found it as different from the bland English chatter of such occasions as if it had been in a different tongue.  It had the tweedy texture of Scotch talk, the characteristic lack of suavity and richness in sense, in casual informativeness, in appositeness.  Here, it was plain, was a people almost demoniac with immense, unsensual, intellectual energy.

In the grocer’s shop they had to wait their turn to be served.  Ellen put in the time staring up at a Peter’s milk chocolate advertisement that hung on the wall, a yodelling sort of landscape showing a mountain like a vanilla ice running down into a lake of Reckitt’s blue; she was under the illusion that it was superb because it was a foreign place.  Yaverland watched the silver-haired grocer slicing breakfast sausage, for Ellen had told him that this was one of the city fathers, and it seemed to him that there was something noble about the old man in his white apron which reminded one of his civic dignity.  Doubtless, however, in his civic robes he would remind one that he was a grocer, for it was the note of Edinburgh, of all lowland Scotland, to rise out of ordinary life to a more than ordinary magnificence, and then to qualify that magnificence by some cynical allusion to ordinary life.  The old man seemed to like Ellen, though she was very rude about his ham and said, “If that’s the best, then times have been hard for the pigs lately.”  Yaverland gave to their bickering amenities an attention that dwelt not so much on the words as the twanging, gibing intonations.  But after they got into the streets again a question and answer began to tease his mind:  “Would you be wanting your change in halfpence, Miss Melville?”