For this at the moment there was plenty of scope. There were, for one thing, the nerve-racking shopping expeditions with Sholto and Juley, both impossible shoppers. Sholto so hated any shop he entered that he always endeavoured to escape without buying what he had come for. It could be got to-morrow, he would say; or probably even better in Australia when he arrived. But Juley, proceeding with a slowness of mind and body that was an affliction to her children, regarded each separate purchase as a campaign in itself. She looked for advice of every shopman, explaining all the circumstances to him, with much reminiscence where she was an old customer: and in every department she found that her son needed far more than she had at first thought necessary. She strongly condemned what she called “scamping ways of doing things,” and in most of the shops she considered it would be as well to replenish Linnet’s wardrobe at the same time. It was a real pleasure to a salesman if he could confront Juley with an improvement or a new invention. She could be carried away by an ingenious patent stud.

Georgie, on the other hand, whatever the purchase, had always seen something very much better and more convenient, not to say cheaper, in London, and she did not fail to make these reproachful facts known to the Glasgow shopkeepers. This enraged Sholto, and he depended on Joanna to make things easier for him. After that first happy breakfast hour, he and Georgie had argued fiercely about everything (particularly about politics and religion), and one day upon Joanna’s suddenly taking Sholto’s side in the discussion Georgie had burst into tears. It was in the middle of dinner and Georgie had rushed from the room calling out that nobody loved her now at home, and that she would be glad to get back to London again. At this Sholto had sworn, Linnet had bolted his pudding and gone off to one of his eternal appointments, and Juley had sent Joanna to comfort her sister and bring her back to table. Soon all their nerves were on edge.

Amid all this Joanna found it so hard to go on with her designs that she almost gave up the idea of sending them in. But the thought of Pender acted here as a spur. She believed that to be worthy of meeting him again she must live up to the loftiest standards of duty, and this drove her to the desperate measure of early rising. Sometimes too she was able for an hour at a time to take refuge in Nilsson’s studio; and her lofty standard, it must be confessed, did not prevent her acceptance of all the help he offered. In one case, without the least pang of conscience, she allowed him to alter a drawing substantially, and in the end her work was handed in well up to time, just two days before Sholto’s sailing.