follow if one did ill to Ellen; for even if nobody ever found out, she would look at one with those eyes.  But this woman was not in the least like Ellen.  He had chosen her rather than the girl in the white boots at the other side of the pavement because he thought she had hair like Ellen, but when she took her hat off he saw that she had not.  It was funny stuff, with an iridescence on it as if she had been rubbing it with furniture polish.  Her flat, too, was not kept as Ellen would have kept it.  And she had not been kind, as Ellen, when she moved softly as a cloud about the office fetching him things, or sat listening, with chin cupped in her hands and a hint of tears, to the story of his disappointment about the Navy; had fraudulently led him to believe what women were to men.  She had been a cruel beast.  For when she had got him to be so very wicked she might have spared him some of the nastiness, and not said those awful leering things so loud.  Never would he forgive Ellen for dragging him down to those depths.

He was walking away from Princes Street to his own home now, and the decent grey vacuity of the streets soothed him.  If he only had the sense to stay in the district of orderly houses where he belonged, and behaved accordingly, and did not go talking with people beneath him, he could not come to harm.  But that would not alter the fact that he had once come to harm.  As he passed the house at the corner of his street he saw that a “To Let” board had been put up since the morning.  He wondered why the Allardyces were leaving it.  He had been at school with the boys.  He and Willie Allardyce had tied tenth in the mile race at the last school sports in which he had taken part before he left the Academy.  He remembered how they had all stood at the starting-post in the windy sunshine, straight lads in their singlets and shorts, utterly uninvolved in anything but this clean thing of running a race; the women were all behind the barriers, tolerated spectators, and one was too busy to see them; his clothing had been stiff with sweat, and when he wriggled his body the cool air passed between his damp vest and his damp flesh, giving him a cold, pure feeling.  Well, he was not a boy any longer.  The Allardyces were moving; everything was changing this way and that; nothing would be the same again....

The solidity of his father’s house, the hall into which he let himself, with its olive green wallpaper, its aneroid barometer, an oil-painting of his mother’s father, Mr. Laurie of the Bank of Scotland, made him feel better.  He reminded himself that he belonged to one of the most respected families in Edinburgh, and that there was no use getting upset about things that nobody would ever find out, and he went into the dining-room and poured himself out a glass of whisky, looking round with deep satisfaction at his prosperous surroundings.  There was a very handsome red wallpaper, and a blazing fire that chased the tawny lights and shadows on the leviathanic mahogany furniture and set a sparkle on the thick silver and fine glass on the spread table.  “Mhm!” he sighed contentedly, and raised the tumbler to his lips.  But the smell of the whisky recalled to him the flavour of that Piccadilly woman’s kisses.