The Judge | Page 5

partner in the firm before you've done with us."
"If I were a man I would be that."

"Better than that for you, lassie, better than that. Wait till a good man
comes by."
She snorted at the closing door, but felt that he had come near to
defining what she wanted. It was not a good man she needed, of course,
but nice men, nice women. She had often thought that of late.
Sometimes she would sit up in bed and stare through the darkness at an
imaginary group of people whom she desired to be with--well-found
people who would disclose themselves to one another with vivacity and
beautiful results; who in large lighted rooms would display a splendid
social life that had been previously nurtured by separate tender
intimacies at hearths that were more than grates and fenders, in private
picture-galleries with wide spaces between the pictures, and libraries
adorned with big-nosed marble busts. She knew that that environment
existed for she had seen it. Once she had gone to a Primrose League
picnic in the grounds of an Edinburgh M.P.'s country home and the
secretary had taken her up to the house. They had waited in a high, long
room with crossed swords on the walls wherever there were not
bookshelves or the portraits of men and women so proud that they had
not minded being painted plain, and there were French windows
opening to a flagged terrace where one could lean on an ornate
balustrade and look over a declivity made sweet with many flowering
trees to a wooded cliff laced by a waterfall that seemed, so broad the
intervening valley, to spring silently to the bouldered river-bed below.
On a white bearskin, in front of one of the few unnecessary fires she
had ever seen, slept a boar-hound. It was a pity that the books lying on
the great round table were mostly the drawings of Dana Gibson and
that when the lady of the house came in to speak to them she proved to
be a lisping Jewess, but that could not dull the pearl of the spectacle.
She insisted on using the memory as a guarantee that there must exist,
to occupy this environment, that imagined society of thin men without
an Edinburgh accent, of women who were neither thin like her
schoolmistresses nor fat like her schoolfellows' mothers and whose hair
had no short ends round the neck.
But sometimes it seemed likely, and in this sad twilight it seemed
specially likely, that though such people certainly existed they had

chosen some other scene than Edinburgh, whose society was as poor
and restricted as its Zoo, perhaps for the same climatic reason. It was
the plain fact of the matter that the most prominent citizen of
Edinburgh to-day was Mary Queen of Scots. Every time one walked in
the Old Town she had just gone by, beautiful and pale as though in her
veins there flowed exquisite blood that diffused radiance instead of
ruddiness, clad in the black and white that must have been a more
solemn challenge, a more comprehensive announcement of free
dealings with good and evil, than the mere extravagance of scarlet
could have been; and wearing a string of pearls to salve the wound she
doubtless always felt about her neck. Ellen glowed at the picture as
girls do at womanly beauty. Nobody of a like intensity had lived here
since. The Covenanters, the Jacobites, Sir Walter Scott and his fellows,
had dropped nothing in the pool that could break the ripples started by
that stone, that precious stone, flung there from France so long ago.
The town had settled down into something that the tonic magic of the
place prevented being decay, but it was though time still turned the
hour-glass, but did it dreamingly, infatuated with the marvellous thing
she had brought forth that now was not. So greatly had the play
declined in plot and character since Mary's time that for the catastrophe
of the present age there was nothing better than the snatching of the
Church funds from the U.F.'s by the Wee Frees. It appeared to her an
indication of the quality of the town's life that they spoke of their
churches by initials just as the English, she had learned from the
Socialist papers, spoke of their trade unions. And for personalities there
were innumerable clergymen and Sir Thomas Gilzean, Edinburgh's
romantic draper, who talked French with a facility that his fellow
townsmen suspected of being a gift acquired on the brink of the pit, and
who had a long wriggling waist which suggested that he was about to
pick up the tails of his elegant frock-coat and dance. He was light
indeed, but not enough to express the lightness of which life was