hers when she was sixteen; of the way she had not minded more than a
wrinkle between the brows those Monday evenings when she had to dodge
among the steamy wet clothes hanging on the kitchen pulleys as she
cooked the supper, those Saturday nights when she and her mother had to
wait for the cheap pieces at the butcher's among a crowd that hawked and
spat and made jokes that were not geniality but merely a mental form of
hawking and spitting; of the way that in those days her attention used
to leap like a lion on the shy beast Beauty hiding in the bush, the
housewifely briskness with which her soul took this beauty and simmered
it in the pot of meditation into a meal that nourished life for days. At
the thought of the premature senility that had robbed her of these
accomplishments now that she was seventeen she began again to weep....

The door opened and Mr. Mactavish James lumbered in, treading bearishly
on his soft slippers, and rubbing the gold frame of his spectacles
against his nose to allay the irritation they had caused by their
persistent pressure during the interview he had been holding with the
representative of another firm: an interview in which he had disguised
his sense of his client's moral instability by preserving the most
impressive physical immobility. The air of the room struck cold on him,
and he went to the fireplace and put on some coal, and sat down on a
high stool where he could feel the warmth. He gloomed over it, pressing
his hands on his thighs; decidedly Todd was in the wrong over this right
of way, and Menzies & Lawson knew it. He looked dotingly across at
Ellen, breathed "Well, well!"--that greeting by which Scot links himself
to Scot in a mutual consciousness of a prudent despondency about life.
Age permitted him, in spite of his type, to delight in her. In his youth
he had turned his back on romance, lest it should dictate conduct that
led away from prosperity, or should alter him in some manner that would
prevent him from attaining that ungymnastic dignity which makes the