But what interested her to the point of horror was the transformed Linnet she now saw. It was evident that the Howdens, the Rintouls, the Bells and the rest (there were not above six families in this particular set) could not quite accept young Bannerman (“Linty” as they called him) as one of themselves. True, he dressed like them, like them wore his hat well back on his head, and shared in all their pursuits. But he was never able to invite them to his house, and always in his background there was the consciousness of a mother eccentric in ways prohibitive to the Bells, the Rintouls and the Howdens. So it had come that Linnet, himself excruciatingly subject to his disabilities, had taken the only way open to his nature. He had traded on the family eccentricity, and in the circle he desired to enter, had constituted himself as clown. He had only to meet one of his gay friends, Joanna noticed, to be electrified into an almost frightening animation. Her heart ached for him as she watched him wave his arms about, and listened to his outrageous speeches. But what touched her to something deeper than pity was the unconscious isolation and contempt that lay beneath his fooling. He had succeeded in his aim. His friends rewarded his queer physical abandonment with laughter and a special kind of affection that apparently gratified him. He was both popular and privileged. But his sister discerned in him something of the wistful, increative solitude which she had obscurely felt in her popular father. “A queer fish” his friends called him, and it was so he liked to think of himself. But as yet he had no being save in the shoal, and thus, not belonging there, had less being than they.

On his tentative introduction of Joanna, Linnet took a slightly altered place in his friends’ estimation and consequently in his own.

She was “uncommon looking,” said the girls, and one of the Howden boys went so far as to fall in love with her for a whole fortnight. She tried to believe herself amused by this new phase of life, threw herself into it, and had the momentary satisfaction of rousing Pender’s possessive instincts. But it could not last long. Before many weeks had passed she knew that Linnet was the only one among her new acquaintances to claim her sympathy, and the mushroom growth of her intimacy with the Howdens, the Bell and the Rintouls died rapidly away.

After all there were other things and far less tiresome that would answer the same end.