about the time of her eighteenth birthday, rather
later than most girls.

She was extraordinarily young; she was inevitably romantic. Living what
amounted to the life of a recluse, it was only to be expected that she
should live her illusions and dreams. Her mind was a storehouse of
folklore, romance, poetry and religion; her rationalistic readings had
not in any way become part of her, though facts and ratiocinations, by
mere feat of memory, were stored in her mind as irrelevances and
unrealities that came elbowing their way through her dreams just as
fantastic thoughts come as one falls asleep.

Never, in all her life, had she known what physical pleasure was; her
bed was hard and very thinly covered--one night her father had taken
away and locked up a blanket because he said she must be hardened. It
had never occurred to her that food could be a pleasure; it was just
something that happened, a recurrence of potatoes, porridge, oatcake and
broth. Only when she had been swimming in the fierce waves or battling
in the winds on Ben Grief with Wullie did she realize the pleasure of
hunger, and that was easily satisfied in the smoking hut when the
Hunchback raked aside the ashes and brought out roast potatoes or
toasted fish that he took down from the roof.

Not knowing other girls she had no one to talk to her about clothes.
Before Rose Lashcairn was ill she had taken great pleasure in dressing
her little girl; soft things, woven of silk and wool, came from London
for her, soft shoes and stockings and frocks of fine texture and
beautiful colour that seemed strange and exotic on Lashnagar. But these
were worn out and never replaced--except for her mother's funeral she
never wore shoes, summer or winter. Her feet and legs were brown and
quite invulnerable to stones or brambles. Her father did not realize
that she needed clothes; her aunt was too much sunk in shadows to notice
the child's appearance. And, reading her legends and romances, it was
natural that Marcella should live them and dress them. In a press in her
mother's room were clothes brought from the old grey house, the
accumulation of days when fabrics were made as heirlooms. There were
plaids and brocades and silks: there was lace from Valenciennes and
linen from Cambrai, yellow with age. There were muslins that a Lashcairn
had brought when he adventured to India with Clive. Rose often wept over
them. Several times Marcella's dreams nearly cost her her life, f