sagacity which was
aware that in this simple town nobody was doing anything more urgent
than going home to supper.

It seemed a courageous little city as it lay at the base of the towering
black and silver Northern night: a brave kindling of comfort in the
midst of the indifferent universe. And Ellen's shopping manner, her east
wind descent on salesmen, showed that she participated in the hardy
quality of her surroundings. In the first shop she was still too much
aware of him to get into her stride. It was a bakery--such a
marvellously stocked bakery as could be found only in the land of that
resourceful people, which, finding itself too poor to have bread and
circuses, set about to make a circus of its bread. She bought a
shepherd's bap, its pale smooth crust velvety with white flour, and an
iced cake that any other nation would have thought prodigious save for a
wedding or a christening, while she smiled deprecatingly at him, as
though she felt these were mawkish foods to be buying in the company of
a friend of bruisers. But in the butcher's shop the Saturday night fever
seized her, and presently Yaverland, who had been staring at a bullock's
carcase and liking the lovely springing arch of the ribs, was startled
to hear her cry, "Mr. Lawson, you surprise me!" But it was only the
price of a piece of a neck of mutton that had surprised her. After that
he listened to the conversation that passed between her and the shopmen,
and found it as different from the bland English chatter of such
occasions as if it had been in a different tongue. It had the tweedy
texture of Scotch talk, the characteristic lack of suavity and richness
in sense, in casual informativeness, in appositeness. Here, it was
plain, was a people almost demoniac with immense, unsensual,
intellectual energy.

In the grocer's shop they had to wait their turn to be served. Ellen put
in the time staring up at a Peter's milk chocolate advertisement that
hung on the wall, a yodelling sort of landscape showing a mountain like
a vanilla ice running down into a lake of Reckitt's blue; she was under
the illusion that it was superb because it was a foreign place.
Yaverland watched the silver-haired grocer slicing breakfast sausage,
for Ellen had told him that this was one of the city fathers, and it
seemed to him that there was something noble about the old man in his
white apron which reminded one of his civic dignity. Doubtless, however,
in his civic robes he wou