who talked French with a
facility that his fellow townsmen suspected of being a gift acquired on
the brink of the pit, and who had a long wriggling waist which suggested
that he was about to pick up the tails of his elegant frock-coat and
dance. He was light indeed, but not enough to express the lightness of
which life was capable; while the darker side of destiny was as
inadequately represented by AEneas Walkinshaw, the last Jacobite, whom at
the very moment Ellen could see standing under the lamp-post at the
corner, in the moulting haberdashery of his wind-draggled kilts and lace
ruffles, cramming treasonable correspondence into a pillar-box marked
G.R.... She wanted people to be as splendid as the countryside, as
noble as the mountains, as variable within the limits of beauty as the
Firth of Forth, and this was what they were really like. She wept
undisguisedly.

II

"What ails you, Miss Melville?" asked Mr. Philip James. He had lit the
gas and seen that she was crying.

At first she said, "Nothing." But there grew out of her gratitude to
this family a feeling that it was necessary, or at least decent, that
she should always answer them with the cleanest candour. As one rewards
the man who has restored a lost purse by giving him some of the coins in
it, so she shared with them, by the most exact explanation of her
motives whenever they were asked for, the self which they had saved. So
she added, "It's just that I'm bored. Nothing ever happens to me!"

Mr. Philip had hoped she was going to leave it at that "Nothing," and
bore her a grudge for her amplification at the same time that the way
she looked when she made it swept him into sympathy. Indeed, he always
felt about the lavish gratitude with which Ellen laid her personality at
the disposal of the firm rather as the Englishman who finds the Chinaman
whom he saved from death the day before sitting on his verandah in the
expectation of being kept for the rest of his life that his rescuer has
forced upon him. It was true that she was an excellent shorthand-typist,
but she vexed the decent grey by her vividness. The sight of her through
an open door, sitting at her typewriter in her blue linen overall,
dispersed one's thoughts; it was as if a wireless found its waves jammed
by another instrument. Often he found himself compelled to abandon his
train of ideas and apprehend her experiences: to feel a little tired
himself if she drooped over her machine, to imagine