Four years earlier, when the middle-aged Swedish artist had come, preceded by a high reputation, to teach design at the Glasgow School, Mrs. Lovatt had piped her sweetest to him. But from the first he had refused to dance. He was a misfit at her parties. Then, as the months passed, and it became clear that there was to be periodic trouble between the temperaments of Nilsson and the Art Director, he was tactfully excluded from the Panmure Crescent salon. Seeing that the Director, Mr. Valentine Plummer, was the salon’s principal pilaster, this could not be wondered at. Had Nilsson not been too valuable to the School, he would have been excluded there also. As it was, Mr. Plummer could only make things uncomfortable for him; and Nilsson, knowing his position secure, retaliated in full measure. Nilsson of course had his own small circle of friends, but outside this he was regarded generally as rather quarrelsome and difficult.

To Joanna, the little man had been consistently friendly, and she knew him of more value than Mrs. Lovatt and all her kind. She had vaguely felt drawn to him – amused and attracted by his irritability – during the term before her marriage.

And now, with his sharp criticisms which she sensitively welcomed, and his adroit praises which never made her ashamed, he had become to her a real helper. He gave her a kind of attention she had not had before from any one.

Also it was at Nilsson’s studio that she first met Phemie Pringle.

He was at work in the School on a fresco in which was a group of women, and asked Joanna to give him sittings for some details of his heads and hands (she had a “useful head,” he told her). And during these sittings, away from the interruption of the School, their friendship had prospered. Carl seemed to enjoy talking to her about herself quite as much as she enjoyed listening. She was not a bit in love with him, but it excited her to hear from his own lips how she appeared to this man for whom she had the deepest respect. She felt she could learn immensely from him, and he gratified her Scottish passion for self-improvement.

On one particular afternoon he had entertained her as he worked by tracing the whole history of their acquaintance.