So you’d put on a kind face and said you were sorry—it was nice of you to think of me. And at that she’d unshrivelled like a weed in the rain, peeking and chittering in your bedroom chair all about herself and her life and her likes; and Ewan’d sat and listened, half-wishing she’d go, half-wondering about her in an idle way. Queer to think she’d been born for that, been young once like oneself and wanted real things: food, wind on the sea, phosphor-bronze smelting … maybe not, but books and sleeping with men. Surely at least she had wanted THAT—her generation had seemed to want little else, blethered in their books about little else, Shaw and the little sham-scientist Wells running a fornication a folio before they could pitch an idea across: gluey devils, the Edwardians, chokers and chignons, worse than the padded Victorian rabbits…. And now at the end she had none of it, went to tea-fights, the Unionist Ladies, she liked Mr MacDonald and the National Government and read lots of faded verse in Scots, the new Scots letters the Edwardian survivals were trying to foist on the Scottish scene—Have you read Dr Pittendrigh MacGillivray’s pomes? Such lovely, I think, and Clean and Fine. And Miss Marion Angus, though they’re awful Broad. And Ewan said he hadn’t, he didn’t read poetry. Then she tweetered from the room and came back with a book of Mr Lewis Spence’s for him to read, all about the ancient Scots, they’d been Awful Powerful in magic. And Ewan said that was nice; and he was sure they had.

Tired after that and a spot of sleep. Chris would waken him up at noon, with a tray and dinner, gleam of bronze hair, dolichocephalic heads scarce in Duncairn, his own one only a betwixt-and-between. And he’d eat, not much, and read some more, Duncairn outside in its afternoon haze, far off the foghorn on Crowie Point lowing like an aurochs with belly-ache—the cattle that Cæsar said couldn’t lie down, no knee joints, they kipped up against a tree…. What the devil had that to do with a chapter on Castings?

Five o’clock, shoes on the stairs, a guffaw, a knock, young Archie Clearmont. Decent chap Archie, if a bit of a bore, baby face, a long story about a Prof: he’d turned round in the lecture-room and said to Archie, and Archie had turned and said to the Prof—, and Ewan nodded and wondered they hadn’t grown dizzy. Rectorial elections coming off soon, Archie thought he’d support the Nationalist. Ewan asked why, and Archie said for a bit of a rag, the Nationalist candidate was Hugo MacDownall, the chap who wrote in Synthetic Scots. Ewan asked Why synthetic? Can’t he write the real stuff? and Archie said I’m damned if I know. Sounds more epileptic than synthetic to me—that’s why I’m interested, I’m going in for Medicals!

John Cushnie next, sure as fate, poor devil with his English and his earnestness, smart, in a new Raggie Robertson suit, he’d brought Ewan an Edgar Wallace to read—you must feel weariet with lying there. And he said ’twas a gey thing when decent chaps, just because they spoke well with a bit of class, were bashed by keelies down in Footforthie. They were never letten into Raggie Robertson’s Depot, time the bobbies took they kind of wasters in hand…. Ewan said What wasters?—Raggie or the keelies? and Cushnie gawked above his tight collar oh ay, ha-ha, but Raggie was all right, he’d a good job there and a chance to get on. A chap didn’t need a union to help if he put his back into a job of work—though Labour wasn’t so bad, look at Bailie Brown. But the Communists—along in Doughty Park on Sunday he’d stopped and listened to that dirty Red, Trease, paid from Moscow as every body knew, splurging away about all workers uniting and yet pitching glaur as fast’s he was able at decent folk like Bailie Brown…. And then, thank God, the tea-bell went, and Cushnie with it, tie, spots, and all.