touch and as carefully beautiful as pictures. But this blue thing was
neither sturdy covering nor the brilliant fantasy it meant to be. It had
the spurious glitter of an imitation jewel. He knew he felt this
irritation about her partly because there was something base in him,
half innate and half the abrasion his present circumstances had rubbed
on his soul, which was willing to go on this stupid sexual journey
suggested by such vain, passive women, and the saner part of him was
vexed at this compliance; he thought he had a real case against her. She
was one of those beautiful women who are not only conscious of their
beauty but have accepted it as their vocation. She was ensphered from
the world of creative effort in the establishment of her own perfection.
She was an end in herself as no human, save some old saint who has made
a garden of his soul, had any right to be.

That little girl Ellen Melville was lovelier stuff because she was at
grips with the world. This woman had magnificent smooth wolds of
shoulders and a large blonde dignity; but life was striking sparks of
the flint of Ellen's being. There came before him the picture of her as
she had been that day in Princes Street, with the hairs straggling under
her hat and her fierce eyes holding back the tears, telling him
haughtily that a great cause made one indifferent to discomfort; and he
nearly laughed aloud. He looked across the hall at her and just caught
her switching her gaze from him to the platform. He felt a curious
swaggering triumph at the flight of her eyes.

But Mrs. Ormiston had begun to speak, and he, too, turned his attention
to the platform. He liked this old woman's invincible quality, the way
she had turned to and made a battering-ram of her own meagre middle-aged
body to level the walls of authority; and she reminded him of his
mother. There was no physical likeness, but plainly this woman also was