lassie," he had said, and had laid a loving, clumsy hand on her
shoulder. What had Mr. Philip been saying now? And she did so want to be
well spoken of. But there was worse than that--something so bad that she
would not allow her mind to harbour any visual image of it, but thought
of it in a harsh, short sentence. _"When Mr. Morrison went out of the
room and we were left alone he got up and set the door ajar...."_
Something weak and little in her cried out, "Oh, God, stop Mr. Philip
being so cruel to me or I shall die!" and something fiercer said, "I
will kill him...."

There was a roar of applause, and she found that Mrs. Ormiston had
finished her speech. This was another iniquity to be charged against Mr.
Philip. The thought of him had robbed her of heaven knows how much of
the wisdom of her idol, and it might be a year or more before Mrs.
Ormiston came to Edinburgh again. She could have cried as she clapped,
but fortunately there was Mrs. Mark Lyle yet to speak. She watched the
advance to the edge of the platform of that tall, beautiful figure in
the shining dress which it would have been an understatement to call
sky-blue, unless one predicated that the sky was Italian, and rejoiced
that nature had so appropriately given such a saint a halo of gold hair.
Then came the slow, clear voice building a crystal bridge of argument
between the platform and the audience, and formulating with an
indignation that was fierce, yet left her marmoreal, an indictment
against the double standard of morality and the treatment of unmarried
mothers.

Ellen clapped loudly, not because she had any great opinion of
unmarried mothers, whom she suspected of belonging to the same type of
woman who would start on a day's steamer excursion and then find that
she had forgotten the sandwiches, but because she was a neat-minded girl
and could not abide the State's pretence that an illegitimate baby had
only one parent when everybody knew that every baby had really two. And
she fell to wondering what this thing was that men did to women. There
was certainly some definite thing. Children, she was sure, came into the
world because of some kind of embrace; and she had learned lately, too,
that women who were very poor sometimes let men do this thing to them
for money: such were the women whom she saw in John Square, when she
came back late from a meeting or a concert, leaning against the
garden-railings, their backs to the lovely nocturnal mystery of