st about the untidiness of her
hair, follow it up by a generalisation on her unworthiness, and then
bang the door, but not too loudly, as if he had good-humouredly
administered a sharp rap over the knuckles to a really justifiable piece
of female imbecility.

Yet while she shook with hate at the memory of what her father was, she
guessed what would please her mother most, and, leaning over her, she
whispered, "Mother, do you hear me? I believe father did care for you
quite a lot in his own way." And the dying woman lifted her lids and
showed eyes that at this lovely thought had relit the fires that had
burned there when she was quite alive, and pressed her daughter's hands
with a fierce, jubilant pressure.

How dared her father contemn her mother so? Her father was not a fool.
That she was quite submissive to life, that it was unthinkable that she
could rebel against society or persons, was not because she was foolish,
but because she was sweet. To question a law would be to cast
imputations against those who made it and those who obeyed it, and that
was a grave responsibility; to question an act would perhaps be to give
its doer occasion for remorse, and in a world of suffering how could she
take upon herself to do that? She had had dignity. She had had that real
wildness which her husband had aped, for she was a true romantic. She
had scorned the plain world where they talk prose more expensively than
most professed romantics do.

Once on the top of a tram towards Craiglockhart she had pointed out to
Ellen a big house of the prosperous, geometric sort, with greenhouses
and a garage and a tennis-court, and said, "Yon's Johnny Faul's house.
He proposed to me once at a picnic on the Isle of May, and I promised
him, but I took it back that very evening because he was that upset at
losing his umbrella. I knew what would come to him from his father, but
I could not fancy marrying a man who was upset at losing his umbrella."
At the recollection Ellen laughed aloud, and cried out, "Mother, you are
such a wee darling!"

And she was more than a romantic; she was a poet. What was there in all
Keats and Shelley but just this same passion for unpossessable things?
It was vulgar, like despising a man because he has not made money though
it is well known that he has worked hard, to do her less honour than
them because she was not able to set down in verse the things she
undoubtedly felt. And she was good, so good--even divinely