black majesty of the Castle Rock, and that a bold wind played with the
dull clothes of the Edinburgh folk and swelled them out into fantastic
shapes like cloaks carried by grandees, were as nothing to her because
the hurricane tore the short ends of her hair from under her hat and
made them straggle on her forehead. "I doubt if I'll be able to
appreciate Keats if this goes on," she meditated gloomily. And the
people that went by, instead of being as usual mere provocation for her
silent laughter, had to-day somehow got power over her and tormented her
by making her suspect the worthlessness of her errand. It seemed the
height of folly to work for the race if the race was like this: men who,
if they had dignity, looked cold and inaccessible to fine disastrous
causes; men who were without dignity and base as monkeys; mountainous
old men who looked bland because the crevices of their expressions had
been filled up with fat, but who showed in the glares they gave her and
her papers an immense expertness in coarse malice; hen-like genteel
women with small mouths and mean little figures that tried for
personality with trimmings and feather boas and all other adornments
irrelevant to the structure of the human body; flappers who swung
scarlet bows on their plaits and otherwise assailed their Presbyterian
environment by glad cries of the appearance; and on all these faces the
smirk of superior sagacity that vulgar people give to the untriumphant
ideal. "I must work out the ethics of suicide this evening," thought
Ellen chokingly, "for if the world's like this it's the wisest thing to
do. But not, of course, until mother's gone."

She mechanically offered a paper to a passing flapper, who rejected it
with a scornful exclamation, "'Deed no, Ellen Melville! I think you're
mad." Ellen recognised her as a despised schoolfellow and gnashed her
teeth at being treated like this by a poor creature who habitually got
thirty per cent, in her arithmetic examination. "Mad, am I? Not so mad