Georgie and Joanna seemed deep in their reading. Joanna, seeing her mother asleep, had kicked off her shoes without untying the laces: her brown beaver hat lay beside her. Both girls were dressed alike in porridge-coloured coats trimmed after the fashion of the nineties, with panels of terra-cotta plush. Ugly garments they were, but they had a special quality in their wearers’ eyes because Aunt Perdy from Italy had chosen them. About a month before, Aunt Perdy, Juley’s sister, till then known to the children by name only, as “poor Aunt Perdy,” who led a vaguely romantic, vaguely unmentionable existence on an Italian hill-top, had seized the chance of her disapproving brother-in-law’s absence to pay them all a visit in Glasgow. During her short stay she had turned the Bannerman household upside-down. It was a household where personal remarks were not made, but Aunt Perdy’s talk had consisted chiefly in personalities. She had turned from her soup at dinner to tell the housemaid that her hair was glorious, but her face stupid: had assured Georgie that her neck and hands were her only good points in looks: had drawn up impromptu horoscopes unasked for each member of the family from Juley to the cook. It was on the occasion of the choosing of the porridge-coloured coats that she had announced with all the gravity and force of prophecy that Joanna promised to be a beauty in the course of time. It was a prophecy rebuked by Juley, but both Joanna and Georgie had heard it; and since that day the relations between the two girls had changed subtly. Till then the elder had been a secret bully. When they were dressing together she would often throw Joanna’s clothes on to the dusty top of the wardrobe, and she had enjoyed watching her suffer. But even then she had sometimes felt a curious spasm in herself seeing her younger sister asleep in the bed they shared. Joanna’s skin made Her think of wild roses, and there was a suggestion of fragility in these undecided contours that roused something besides her contempt. Not so very long before, at a Christmas party at Aunt Georgina’s when their mother had arrived very late, bringing her whole flock – though only two had been expected – Cousin Irene, newly returned from “finishing” in France, had swept the apologetic little Glasgow group with her tortoiseshell lorgnette (Irene was terribly fashionable).

“What stu-u-r-dy children!” she had drawled.

Juley, proud of the robust bodies she had brought forth and reared, had smiled delighted at the compliment. But Georgie had been lashed by her cousin’s patronage. She had stood out crimsoning and looking in that moment sturdier than ever.