ntentedly, and raised the tumbler to his lips. But the smell of the
whisky recalled to him the flavour of that Piccadilly woman's kisses.

The room seemed to contract and break out into soiled pink valances. He
put down his glass, groaned, and made his mind blank, and was
immediately revisited by the thought of Ellen's face on her spilt red
hair. An ingenious thought struck him, and he hurried from the room. He
met one of his sisters in the passage, and said, "Away, I want to speak
to father." It was true that she was not preventing him from doing so,
but the gesture of dominance over the female gave him satisfaction.

There was a little study at the back of the house which was lined from
top to bottom with soberly bound and unrecent books, and dominated by a
bust of Sir Walter Scott supported on a revolving bookcase which
contained the Waverley Novels, Burns' Poems, and Chambers' Dictionary,
which had an air of having been put there argumentatively, as a
manifesto of the Scottish view that intellect is their local industry.
Here, in a fog of tobacco smoke, Mr. Mactavish James reclined like a
stranded whale, reading the London _Law Journal_ and breathing
disparagingly through both mouth and nose at once, as he always did when
in contact with the English mind. He did not look up when Mr. Philip
came in, but indicated by a "Humph!" that he was fully aware of the
entrance. There was an indefinable tone in this grunt which made Mr.
Philip wonder whether he had not been overmuch influenced in seeking
this interview by the conventional view of the parental relationship. He
sometimes suspected that his father regarded him with accuracy, rather
than with the indulgence that fathers habitually show to their only
sons. But he went at it.

"Father, you'll have to speak to yon Melville girl."

Mr. Mactavish James did not raise his eyes, but enquired with the
faintest threat of mockery, "What's she been doing to you, Philip?"

"She's not been doing anything to me. What could she do? But I've just
seen her in Princes Street with yon fellow Yaverland, the client from
Rio. They were coming out of the station and they took a cab."

"What for should they not?"

"You can't have a typist prancing about with clients at this time of
night."

"It's airly yet," said Mr. Mactavish James mildly, continuing to turn
over the pages of the _Law Journal_. "We've not had our dinners yet.
Though from the way the smell of victuals is roaring up