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.

Assuredly it would have been difficult to find anything in greater contrast to the quiet, sad-coloured life at Collessie Street, with its intense spiritual currents, than this household of Sans Souci.

CHAPTER TWO

I

I’ve got Louis Pender (you know his work, of course) coming here unexpectedly for the week-end, and as there is a students’ dance at the School to-morrow night, I thought we might go on there after dinner with our little party. Will you be one of us? Do. We dine at a quarter to eight. Don’t answer, but come.“

On the morning of the day appointed for Miss Gedge’s meeting, the post brought Joanna this invitation from Mrs. Lovatt, and she read it through in a growing distraction.

It seemed to her that she had never before wanted so much to accept an invitation as she did now; and a malignant fate had fixed the affair at St. Saviour’s for seven o’clock that same night! She would know better another time than to let herself be nagged into giving her word.