on the great round table were mostly the drawings
of Dana Gibson and that when the lady of the house came in to speak to
them she proved to be a lisping Jewess, but that could not dull the
pearl of the spectacle. She insisted on using the memory as a guarantee
that there must exist, to occupy this environment, that imagined society
of thin men without an Edinburgh accent, of women who were neither thin
like her schoolmistresses nor fat like her schoolfellows' mothers and
whose hair had no short ends round the neck.

But sometimes it seemed likely, and in this sad twilight it seemed
specially likely, that though such people certainly existed they had
chosen some other scene than Edinburgh, whose society was as poor and
restricted as its Zoo, perhaps for the same climatic reason. It was the
plain fact of the matter that the most prominent citizen of Edinburgh
to-day was Mary Queen of Scots. Every time one walked in the Old Town
she had just gone by, beautiful and pale as though in her veins there
flowed exquisite blood that diffused radiance instead of ruddiness, clad
in the black and white that must have been a more solemn challenge, a
more comprehensive announcement of free dealings with good and evil,
than the mere extravagance of scarlet could have been; and wearing a
string of pearls to salve the wound she doubtless always felt about her
neck. Ellen glowed at the picture as girls do at womanly beauty. Nobody
of a like intensity had lived here since. The Covenanters, the
Jacobites, Sir Walter Scott and his fellows, had dropped nothing in the
pool that could break the ripples started by that stone, that precious
stone, flung there from France so long ago. The town had settled down
into something that the tonic magic of the place prevented being decay,
but it was though time still turned the hour-glass, but did it
dreamingly, infatuated with the marvellous thing she had brought forth
that now was not. So greatly had the play declined in plot and character
since Mary's time that for the catastrophe of the present age there was
nothing better than the snatching of the Church funds from the U.F.'s by
the Wee Frees. It appeared to her an indication of the quality of the
town's life that they spoke of their churches by initials just as the
English, she had learned from the Socialist papers, spoke of their trade
unions. And for personalities there were innumerable clergymen and Sir
Thomas Gilzean, Edinburgh's romantic draper,