g. She has such a power of repartee that the interrupters
have to be carried out on stretchers."

"Ah, ye're all impudent wee besoms thegither," said Mr. Mactavish James,
and set his eyes wide on her face. From something throbbing in her
speech he hoped that the spring of her distress had not yet run dry.

"Why are you not more respectful to the Suffragettes? You're polite
enough to the Covenanters, and yet they fought and killed people, while
we haven't killed even a policeman, though there's a constable in the
Grange district whose jugular vein I would like fine to sever with my
teeth for what he said to me when I was chalking pavements. If you don't
admire us you shouldn't admire the Covenanters."

"The Covenanters were fighting for religion," he murmured, keeping his
eyes on her face.

"So's this religion, and it's of some practical use, moreover," she
answered listlessly. She drew her hands down her face, threw up her
arms, and breathed a fatigued, shuddering sigh. The conversation had
begun to seem to her intolerably insipid because they were not talking
of Yaverland.

She rose to her feet, moved distractedly about the room, and then, with
a purposefulness that put into his stare that terrified cold enmity with
which the sane look upon even the beloved mad, she swept two rulers off
her desk on to the floor. But she knelt down and set them cross-wise,
and then straightened herself and crooked her arms above her head, and
began to dance a sword-dance. Even her filial relations to him hardly
justified such a puncture of office discipline, and he sat blowing at it
until he saw that this was a new phase of her so entertaining misery. It
is always absurd when that pert and ferocious dance, invented by an
unsensuous race inordinately and mistakenly vain of its knees, is
performed by a graceful girl; and Ellen added to that incongruity by
dancing languorously, passionately. It was like hearing the wrong words
sung to a familiar tune. And her face was at discord with both the dance
and her performance of it, for she was fixedly regarding someone who was
not there. "She is fey!" he thought tolerantly, and gloated over this
fresh display of her unhappiness and his pity, though a corner of his
mind was busy hoping that Mr. Morrison would not come in. It was unusual
in Edinburgh for a solicitor (at any rate in a sound firm) to sit and
watch his typist dancing.

But soon she stopped dancing. Her need to speak of Yaverland