over to irritations, as characteristic
of the harshness of Edinburgh life. Here was a cause so beautiful in its
affirmation of freedom that it should have been served only by the
bravery of dignified women and speeches lucent with reason and
untremulously spoken, by things that would require no change of quality
but only rearrangements to be instantly commemorable by art; and yet
this Scotch woman, moving with that stiffness of the mental joints which
nations which suffer from it call conscientiousness, had managed to turn
a sacramental gathering of the faithful into a steamy short-tempered
activity, like washing-day. "Think shame on yourself, Ellen Melville!"
she rebuked herself. "She's a better woman than ever you'll be, with the
grand work she's done at the Miller's Wynd Dispensary." But that the
doctor was a really fine woman made the horsehair texture of her manner
all the more unpleasing, for it showed her sinisterly illustrative of a
community which had reached an intellectual standard that could hardly
be bettered and which possessed certain moral energy, and yet was
content to be rude. Amongst these people Ellen felt herself, with her
perpetual tearful desire that everybody should be nice, to be a tenuous
and transparent thing. She doubted if she would ever be able to contend
with such as they. "Maybe I shall not get on after all!" she thought,
and her heart turned over with fear.

But Mrs. Ormiston was speaking now. Oh, it was treason to complain
against the world when it held anything so fine as this! She stood very
far forward on the platform, and it seemed as though she had no friends
in the world but did not care. Beauty was hers, and her white face, with
its delicate square jaw and rounded temples, recalled the pansy by its
shape. She wore a dress of deep purple, that colour which is almost a
sound, an emotion, which is seen by the mind's eye when one hears great
music. Her hoarse, sweet North-country voice rushed forth like a wind
bearing the sounds of a battlefield, the clash of arms, the curses
hurled at an implacable and brutish enemy, the sights of the dying--for
already some had died; and with a passion that preserved her words from
the common swift mortality of spoken things she told stories of her
followers' brave deeds which seemed to remain in the air and deck the
hall like war-tattered standards. She spoke of the women who were
imprisoned at Birmingham for interrupting Mr. Asquith's meeting, and