“Of course I know it,” she said, after a scarcely perceptible pause. “I’m wearing a chemise now that I got there. It’s the best I ever had!”

“That’s the worst of mamma’s things,” rejoined Phemie. “They wear everlastingly. I have one on too – for a wonder!”

They both laughed a little tremulously now that their anxiety was gone. It was all right. Things were going to be all right between them.

V

Thus it was, that Joanna came for the first time upon the reservoir of human life which gives to Glasgow its essential character. And she came upon it in its purity at Sans Souci, the villa on the South Side of the river, where the Pringle family vociferously lived.

It is curious how completely a household like the Bannermans’ may lead an alien existence in a town. Juley, only coming to live in Glasgow on her marriage, had long kept the feelings of an exile; and something of this had been communicated to her children. On Sholto’s side, the family associations had been with the citizens of the passing generation, and his public ties had died with him. Even in his lifetime Edinburgh had come to be regarded as the true Bannerman headquarters.

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.)