bout it, and there was no question of anything fresh ever
happening to her. But from the deep, slow breaths this woman drew, from
the warmth that seemed to radiate from her, from those purring murmurs
which were evidently the sounds of a powerful mental engine running
slow, it was plain that she was still possessed of that vitality which
makes people perform dramas. And everything about her threatened that
her performances would be too strange.

She had a proof of that when the taxi turned out of a busy street into a
brilliantly lit courtyard and halted behind another cab, suspending her
in a scene that deserved to be gaped at because it was so definitely not
Edinburgh. The air of the little quadrangle was fairly dense with the
yellowed rays of extravagant light, and the walls were divided not into
shops and houses, but into allegorical panels representing pleasure.
They had stopped outside a florist's, in whose dismantled window a girl
in black stretched out a long arm towards the last vase of
chrysanthemums, which pressed against the glass great curled polls
almost as large as her own head. It was impossible to imagine a
Scotswoman practising so felinely elastic an attitude before the open
street, or possessing a face so ecstatic with pertness, or finding
herself inside a dress which, though black, disclaimed all intention of
being mourning and sought rather, in its clinging economy, to be an
occasion of public rejoicing.

Inconceivable, too, in Edinburgh, the place beside it, where behind
plate glass walls, curtained with flimsy _brise-bises_ that were as a
ground mist, men and women ate and drank under strong lights with a
divine shamelessness. It couldn't happen up there. There were simply not
the people to do it. It might be tried at first; but because middle-aged
men would constantly turn to middle-aged women and say, "Catch me
bringing you here again, Elspeth. It's a nice thing to have your dinner
with every Tom, Dick and Harry in the street watching every mouthful you
take," and because young men would as constantly have turned to young
women with the gasp, "I'm sure I saw father passing," it would have been
a failure. But here it was a success. The sight was like loud, frivolous
music. And on the other side there was a theatre with steps leading up
to a glittering bow-front, and a dark wall spattered with the white
squares of playbills, under which a queue of people watched with happy
and indifferent faces a