was an awful young blackguard, playing with the keelies all he could and
gossiping with the cabmen on the rank. She wouldn't have a word to say
to him, and grandfather would never ask him to the house, not even when
all the English were licking his boots. I'm not much on these writing
chaps myself." He made scornful noises and crossed his legs as though he
had disposed of art.

"And who," asked Ellen, with temper, "might your Aunt Phemie be?
There'll not be much in the papers when she's laid by in Trinity
Cemetery, I'm thinking! The impairtinence of it! All these Edinburgh
people ought to go on their knees and thank their Maker that just once,
just once in that generation, He let something decent come out of
Edinburgh!" She turned away from him and laid her cheek against the oak
shutter.

Mr. Philip chuckled. When a woman did anything for itself, and not for
its effect on the male, it seemed to him a proof of her incapacity to
look after herself, and he found incapacity in women exciting and
endearing. He watched her with a hard attention that was his kind of
tenderness, as she sat humped schoolgirlishly in her shapeless blue
overall, averting her face from the light but attempting a proud pose,
and keeping her grief between her teeth as an ostler chews a straw.

"He had a good time, the way he travelled in France and the South Seas.
But he deserved it. He wrote such lovely books. Ah," she said, listening
to her own sombre interpretation of things as to sad music, "it isn't
just chance that some people had adventures and others hadn't. One makes
one's own fate. I have no fate because I'm too weak to make one." She
looked down resentfully on her hands, that for all her present
fierceness and the inkstains of her daily industry lay little things on