To the Bannermans from Glasgow the worldly grandeur of their father’s eldest sister did not make for comfort. They would far rather have stayed, as Mabel did, with the gentler spinster Aunt Ellen, in her rambling house at Colinton that had been worn shabby by generations of the family. True, even at Aunt Ellen’s there was nothing like the freedom of Collessie Street, but at least one did not suffer from constant strain and terror. Mabel was double-faced, but she put on no airs like Cousin Irene, whose recent engagement to a rising young member of Parliament had caused a stir in Edinburgh Society. Mabel was only too glad to be invited to Duntarvie on the holidays and to wear Georgie’s outgrown muslins. Though her mother had been a Bannerman, her father had come of less desirable stock. But Aunt Georgina’s husband was Lord Westermuir, a judge of the Court of Session; and her prune-coloured silk gown that rustled, her long, gold ear-rings that dangled, and the profusion of old lace which was displayed on her handsome bosom, all proclaimed that in her the high-water mark of the Bannerman house had been reached.

The same ineffable standard was set by Aunt Georgina’s luncheon table, at which on the following day the Glasgow Bannermans took their places. At Moray Place every meal was a ceremony. But luncheon with its decked sideboard, its gloss of perfect damask, its array of polished crystal and crested silver, and its ormolu-handled fruit dishes of apple green and gold, was for the children the supremely disconcerting event of the day. Joanna had always connected its restrained lavishness with a verse of Scripture often quoted by her mother, bidding us to “seek first the Kingdom of God …” It was the “all these things” of the latter part of the text, which were to be “added unto” the obedient seeker, that seemed embodied to the carnal eye in Aunt Georgina’s table at precisely one o’clock each day. And it was a puzzle to the child, considering her mother’s fine enthusiasm for God’s kingdom, that the Collessie Street appointments should remain so lacking in elegance.

That morning Juley had taken the four children and Mabel to the opening of the Free Church Assembly. For her it was the treat of the year, and she was so genuinely aglow with it that the children had to share in her elation. Besides, the big ministerial gathering on the Mound was an impressive sight, especially to those who had a traditional part in it, and had not both their grandfathers “come out” at the Disruption of 1843? Had not Grandpapa Bannerman been so famous that whenever they visited they saw his engraved portrait hanging in people’s entrance halls?