poster hung from her waist and a bundle of papers tucked under her arm.
This street-selling had always been a martyrdom to her proud spirit, for
it was one of the least of her demands upon the universe that she should
be well thought of eternally and by everyone; but she had hitherto been
sustained by the reflection that while there were women in jail, as
there were always in those days, it ill became her to mind because Lady
Cumnock (and everyone knew what she was, for all that she opened so many
bazaars) laughed down her long nose as she went by. But now Ellen had
lost all her moral stiffening, and as that had always been her specialty
she was distressed by the lack; she felt like a dress-shirt that a
careless washerwoman had forgotten to starch. The giggling of the
passers-by and the manifest unpopularity of her opinions pricked her to
tears, and she mournfully perceived that she had ceased to be a poet.
For that the day was given over to a high melancholy of grey clouds,
which did not let the least stain of weak autumn sunlight discolour the
black majesty of the Castle Rock, and that a bold wind played with the
dull clothes of the Edinburgh folk and swelled them out into fantastic
shapes like cloaks carried by grandees, were as nothing to her because
the hurricane tore the short ends of her hair from under her hat and
made them straggle on her forehead. "I doubt if I'll be able to
appreciate Keats if this goes on," she meditated gloomily. And the
people that went by, instead of being as usual mere provocation for her
silent laughter, had to-day somehow got power over her and tormented her
by making her suspect the worthlessness of her errand. It seemed the
height of folly to work for the race if the race was like this: men who,
if they had dignity, looked cold and inaccessible to fine disastrous
causes; men who were without dignity and base as monkeys; mountainous
old men who looked bland because the crevices of their expressions had
been filled up with fat, but who showed in the glares they gave her and
her papers an immense expertness in coarse malice; hen-like genteel
women with small mouths and mean little figures that tried for
personality with trimmings and feather boas and all other adornments
irrelevant to the structure of the human body; flappers who swung
scarlet bows on their plaits and otherwise assailed their Presbyterian
environment by glad cries of the appearance; and on all these faces the
smirk of sup