e 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 slum-dwellers 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.... She stopped and
said, "Yon about Holyrood's a fine image for the institution of
monarchy." For she was a Suffragette, so far as it is possible to be a
Suffragette effectively when one is just seventeen, and she spent much
of her time composing speeches which she knew she would always be too
shy to deliver. "There is a sinister air about palaces. Always they
appear like the camp of an invading army that is uneasy and keeps a good
look-out lest they need shoot. Remember they are always ready to
shoot...." She interrupted herself with a click of annoyance. "I see
myself standing on a herring-barrel and trying to hold the crowd with
the like of that. It's too literary. I always am. I doubt I'll never
make a speaker. 'Deed, I'll never be anything but the wee typist that I
am...." And misery rushed in on her mind again. She fell to watching the
succession of little black figures that huddled in their topcoats as
they came down the side-street, bent suddenly at the waist as they came
to the corner and met the full force of the east wind, and then pulled
themselves upright and butted at it afresh with dour faces. The
spectacle evoked a certain local pride, for such inclemencies were just
part of the asperity of conditions which she reckoned as the price one
had to pay for the dignity of living in Edinburgh; which indeed gave it
its dignity, since to survive anything so horrible proved one good rough
stuff fit to govern the rest of the world. But chiefly it evoked
desolation. For she knew none of these people. In all the town there was
nobody but her mother who was at all aware of her. It was six months
since she left John Thompson's Ladies' College in John Square, so by
this time the teachers would barely remember that she had been strong in
Latin and mathematics but weak in French, and they were the only adult
people who had ever heard her name. She wanted to be tremendously known
as strong in everything by personalities more glittering than these.
Less than that would do: