took away
her breath.

She slouched across the room to the window, laid her cheek to the glass,
and said rapidly, "It is bad weather. It is bad weather here an awful
lot of the time. Mr. Yaverland says there is a place in Peru where it is
always spring. That would be bonny." She felt relieved and warmed as
soon as she had mentioned his name, and sat down easily in the
window-seat and smiled back at the old man.

"Ehem! So this Mr. Yaverland has surveyed mankind from China to Peru, as
the great Dr. Johnson says."

But she could not speak of Yaverland again so soon. She tried to make
time by wrangling. "Why do you call him the great Dr. Johnson? He was
just a rude old thing."

"He was a man of sense, lassie, a man of sense."

"What's sense?" she cried, and flung wide her arms. Her body pricked
with a general emotion that was not relevant to the words she spoke, and
indeed she was not quite aware what those were. "Sense isn't sitting in
your chair all day and ruining the coats of your--of your digestion
drinking too much tea and contradicting everybody and being rude to Mrs.
Thrale when the poor body married again."

"It was a fule's marriage," said Mr. Mactavish James; "the widow of a
substantial man taking up wi' an Italian fiddler."

"Marriage with one man's no worse than marriage with another, the way
they all are," said Ellen darkly, and got back to her argument. "And
hating the Scotch and democracy, and saying blunt foolish things as if
they were blunt wise ones--that's not sense. And if it were, what's the
good of living to be sensible? It's like living to have five fingers on
your hand. And life's so short! Mr. James, does it never worry you
dreadfully that life is so short? I wonder how we all bear up about it.
One ought to live for adventure. I want to go away, right away. There
are such lots of lovely places where there are palms, and people get
romantically shot, and there's a town somewhere where poppies grow on
the roofs of mosques. I would like to see that. And queer people--masked
Touaregs--"

"Lassie, you are blethering," said Mr. Mactavish James, "this is a
pairfect salad of foreign pairts."

It had to come out. "Mr. Yaverland says Peru is lovely. He has been both
sides of the Andes. He liked Peru. There are silver mines at Iquique and
etairnal spring at the place whose name I have forgotten. Funny that I
should forget the name of the one place on airth where there is etairnal
spring! If I ha