In this they were quite mistaken, for the key to his paranoia was a delusion (and delusion it was) that he was impotent, and the consequent conflict imposed by the need to abandon his delusion produced not an amelioration but a crisis which grew rapidly worse. From claims that he was being watched and spied upon he moved to accusations that Catherine was secretly betraying him. In March 1905, when she was pregnant, he swore the child could not be his and its father was probably the Prince of Wales. A few days later he produced a revolver, which she took from him and threw out of the window. He was taken to a mental hospital, where he remained under a certificate, too dangerous to be discharged, for the rest of his life. He would see neither his wife nor his daughter Diana, who was born in October 1905.

Catherine returned to Glasgow to live with her mother, and was received with a mixture of sympathy and reservation. Her husband was thirty-six, and as the law stood there seemed no way she could avoid being married to him for the rest of his life.

Soon after coming back to Glasgow she started on her writing career as dramatic critic and fiction reviewer for the Glasgow Herald. This renewed her contact with Donald Carswell – the Lawrence Urquhart of the novel – whom she had known when they were studying together at the university, and who was now a sub-editor on the Herald. The Louis of the novel had come to Glasgow about the time of Catherine’s return. This was Maurice Greiffenhagen, who became Professor of the life Class at the Glasgow School of Art – then at the height of its fame – in 1906. Greiffenhagen was already a well-known artist who went on to be an academician and, in his time, a fashionable portrait painter. He had painted what is perhaps the picture by which he is best remembered as long ago as 1891, when he was thirty. This was “An Idyll” which shows a brawny shepherd enthusiastically embracing a reluctant but not wholly unwilling shepherdess in the woodland setting. It hangs today in the Walker Art Galley, and must have been a rather bold purchase at the time. D. H. Lawrence, then teaching at Croydon and still an unknown schoolmaster, saw it in 1908 and was so impressed that he made copies of it and wrote to one of his friends: “As for Greiffenhagen’s ‘Idyll’ it has moved me as much as if I were fallen in love myself.” Later events in Catherine’s life add a strange poignancy to this coincidence.

Greiffenhagen was forty-four when he met Catherine, and she fell lastingly in love with him. He was married, with a family, and seventeen years older.