, as she pinned on
her tam-o'-shanter and ran down the stairs, how the cold air would
presently prick her smooth skin. Yet these apprehensions were quite
uncoloured by any emotional tone. It was simply that she was essentially
conspicuous, that one had to watch her as one watches a very tall man
going through a crowd. Even now, instead of registering disapproval at
her moodiness, he was looking at her red hair and thinking how it
radiated flame through the twilight of her dark corner, although in the
sunlight it always held the softness of the dusk. That was
characteristic of her tendency always to differ from the occasion. He
had once seen her at a silly sort of picnic where everybody was making a
great deal of noise and playing rounders, and she had sat alone under a
tree. And once, as he was walking along Princes Street on a cruel day
when there was an easterly ha'ar blowing off the Firth, she had stepped
towards him out of the drizzle, not seeing him but smiling sleepily. It
was strange how he remembered all these things, for he had never liked
her very much.

He put his papers on the table and sat down by the fire. "Well, what
should happen? No news is good news, I've heard!"

She continued to disclose herself to him without the impediment of
shyness, for he was unattractive to her because he had an Edinburgh
accent and always carried an umbrella. He was so like hundreds of young
men in the town, dark and sleek-headed and sturdily under-sized, with an
air of sagacity and consciously shrewd eyes under a projecting brow,
that it seemed like uttering one's complaint before a jury or some other
representative body. She believed, too, that he was not one of the
impeccable and happy to whom one dare not disclose one's need for pity,
for she was sure that the clipped speech that slid through his
half-opened mouth was a sign that secretly he was timid and ashamed. So
she cried honestly, "I'm so dull that I'll die. You and Mr. James are
awfully good to me, and I can put up with Mr. Morrison, though he's a
doited old thing, and I like my work, but coming here in the morning and
going home at night, day in and day out, it drives me crazy. I don't
know what's the matter with me, but I want to run away to new places and
see new people. This morning I was running to catch the tram and I saw
the old wife who lives in the wee house by the cycle shop had put a bit
heather in a glass bottle at the window, and do you know, I was nea