It followed that the children had chosen their few playmates most naturally from among the exotics. And this was especially true of Joanna, with the hysterical aloofness of her youth. She had grown up wonderfully ignorant of her native place. Her West-End school-fellows, with their clipped syllables and narrowed vowel sounds (fondly imitative of an “English” accent), had revealed but a fragment of its integral life, and that, as it were, under protest.

But in the world of Sans Souci, the mocking, hardworking, mercurial people were true citizens. Their streams of being flowed bright and uncontaminated from Glasgow’s central pulse. And they knew it. They were more at home in Paris than in Edinburgh. Buchanan Street existed for them alone.

At first, thrown among so many young and pleasure-loving women, Joanna felt bewildered. But soon she was making good all the enjoyment denied to her shadowed and painful teens.

At Sans Souci there was a constant noise of talk and laughter. Married sons and daughters ran continually in and out. The unmarried ones lived in an atmosphere of sweethearting which pervaded the rooms and the garden. The family was sharply divided into blondes and brunettes, accounted for by the Italian strain. (For old Mr. Pringle, who wore a sombrero in the garden and had flashing eyes lost no time in making it clear to Joanna that his distant forbears had been called, not Pringle but Pellegrini.)

From the crowd of them – “our Florrie,” “our Tom’s wife,” “our Polly’s wee girl,” “our Nora’s ‘latest’” – there principally emerged for Joanna, Annie, grave and handsome with a pile of honey-coloured hair, Nora, black-haired, skinny, and almost uncannily vivacious, and pale, strange-eyed Jimmie who was generally understood to be Phemie’s young man.

All the doors of all the rooms were left open, and long conversations were carried on by people in different rooms, on different floors. The single servant, which mamma considered sufficient for the needs of any family, never stayed long. But her going inconvenienced nobody. Even when she had not yet gone, there would always be more people in the kitchen than in the drawing-room. Particularly when mamma was in the house was it an understood thing that no one should sit down for more than a minute at a time. To be settled in an armchair reading was violently contrary to mamma’s fixed notions of young womanhood. It was not thus that she had built the business up.

And for mamma the business was life, was romance. She had built it up herself out of nothing, her husband finally taking his humble place in it as book-keeper (for Mrs. Pringle could not add a column of figures); and her nine children and these children’s Mends were shadowy to her, except in so far as they touched the well-being of the business. When Joanna was introduced, Mrs. Pringle had taken her hand in a strong clasp, very like Phemie’s own. But there had been no scrutiny whatever in the innocent eyes that were set far apart in the broad, babyish face; and Joanna had felt sure she would not be recognized on a second meeting. Mere human beings were excluded from the absorbing pattern of this woman’s existence.