gh New Town, and
Ellen was looking up the sidestreet that opened just opposite and
revealed, menacing as the rattle of spears, the black rock and bastions of
the Castle against the white beamless glare of the southern sky. And it
was the hour of the clear Edinburgh twilight, that strange time when the
world seems to have forgotten the sun though it keeps its colour; it could
still be seen that the moss between the cobblestones was a wet bright
green, and that a red autumn had been busy with the wind-nipped trees, yet
these things were not gay, but cold and remote as brightness might be on
the bed of a deep stream, fathoms beneath the visitation of the sun. At
this time all the town was ghostly, and she loved it so. She took her mind
by the arm and marched 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 bonewhite 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 slumdwellers 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...."

=ii=

_The Judge_ is certainly autobiographical in some of the material
employed. For instance, it is a fact that Miss West went to school in
Edinburgh, attending an institution not unlike John Thompson's Ladies
College referred to in _The Judge_ (but only referred to). It is a fact,
as everyone who knows anything about Miss West knows, that Miss West was
an ardent suffragette in that time before suffragettes had ceased from
troubling and Prime Ministers were at rest. An amazing legend got about
some time ago that Rebecca West's real name was Regina Miriam Bloch. Then
on the strength of the erring "Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature"
did Miss Amy Wellington write a sprightly article for the Literary Review
of the New York Evening Post. Miss Wellington referred to this mysterious
Regina Miriam Bloch who had stunned everybody by her early articles
written unde