cod-fish,' and added by way of a final insult that you thought the woman
had a kind heart.

"And I laughed and thought the War had changed you. It didn't change me,
to my shame be it said. I thought I was doing wonders posing about in a
head-dress at Red Cross meetings, and getting up entertainments, and
even my neverceasing anxiety about you simply seemed to make me more
keen about amusing myself.

"Do you remember a story we liked when we were children, _The Gold of
Fairnilee_? Do you remember how Randal, carried away by the fairies,
lived contented until his eyes were touched with the truth-telling
water, and then Fairyland lost its glamour and he longed for the old
earth he had left, and the changes of summer and autumn, and the streams
of Tweed and his friends?

"Is it, do you suppose, because we had a Scots mother that I find, deep
down within me, that I am 'full of seriousness'? It is rather
disconcerting to think oneself a butterfly and find out suddenly that
one is a--what? A bread-and-butter fly, shall we say? Something quite
solid, anyway.

"As I say, I suddenly became deadly sick of everything. I simply
couldn't go on. And it was no use going burying myself at Bidborough or
even dear Mintern Abbas; it would have been the same sort of trammelled,
artificial existence. I wanted something utterly different. Scotland
seemed to call to me--not the Scotland we know, not the shooting,
yachting, West Highland Scotland, but the Lowlands, the Borders, our
mother's countryside.