it up and down among the sights of Edinburgh, telling it that to be
weeping with discontent in such a place was a scandalous turning up of
the nose at good mercies. Now the Castle Esplanade, that all day had
proudly supported the harsh, virile sounds and colours of the drilling
regiments, would show to the slums its blank surface, bleached
bone-white by the winds that raced above the city smoke. Now the Cowgate
and the Canongate would be given over to the drama of the disorderly
night; the slum-dwellers would foregather about the rotting doors of
dead men's mansions and brawl among the not less brawling ghosts of a
past that here never speaks of peace, but only of blood and argument.
And Holyrood, under a black bank surmounted by a low bitten cliff, would
lie like the camp of an invading and terrified army.... She stopped and
said, "Yon about Holyrood's a fine image for the institution of
monarchy." For she was a Suffragette, so far as it is possible to be a
Suffragette effectively when one is just seventeen, and she spent much
of her time composing speeches which she knew she would always be too
shy to deliver. "There is a sinister air about palaces. Always they
appear like the camp of an invading army that is uneasy and keeps a good
look-out lest they need shoot. Remember they are always ready to
shoot...." She interrupted herself with a click of annoyance. "I see
myself standing on a herring-barrel and trying to hold the crowd with
the like of that. It's too literary. I always am. I doubt I'll never
make a speaker. 'Deed, I'll never be anything but the wee typist that I
am...." And misery rushed in on her mind again. She fell to watching the
succession of little black figures that huddled in their topcoats as
they came down the side-street, bent suddenly at the waist as they came
to the corner and met the full force of the east wind, and then pulled
themselves upright and butted at it afresh with dour faces. The
spectacle evoked a certain local pride, for such inclemencies were just
part of the asperity of conditions which she reckoned as the price one