Also Juley failed them socially, and the girls felt this more than they knew. They were no longer invited to Aunt Georgina’s. Soon they hardly went anywhere. Sholto’s acquaintances dropped off one by one, and most of Juley’s “friends in the Lord” were either freakish or out at elbow; so that Joanna came to think that Heaven must have a predilection for ill-looking oddities. Some of them turned out to be rogues as well. One, a negro revivalist to whom Juley’s efforts had opened two Glasgow pulpits, was discovered to be a bigamist on a brilliant scale. Another, a Polish-American Jew who had paid long visits to them in Collessie Street, and addressed many drawing-room meetings there, absconded with the money collected for the establishment of a Hebrew mission-church in New York. Even the more deserving were feeble creatures in any earthly sense, and Juley herself sometimes mourned the days of her youth when God’s people made a better show in the world of mammon. She never put down the change to her own growing eccentricity. Though always perfectly cleanly and careful in detail she was dressing herself with increasing dowdiness, and she sorely grudged herself a new garment. Her income was strained by the children’s growing needs, but she none the less continued as Sholto had done, to set aside one-tenth of it “for the Lord,” and never did she refuse an appeal for help, whether made to her purse, her time or her strength. She was loved by the poor. But Joanna and Georgie, just as they would have given all the spiritual qualities of their home for material graciousness, would gladly have exchanged their mother’s unselfishness for dignity and tact.

II

It was therefore natural that both the girls should turn for help to the fine arts. It was a misfortune that neither was greatly gifted, but Georgie at any rate had no hesitation in accepting her own enthusiasm as marked talent if not genius. The only thing she was uncertain about was the field in which this talent was to have play. She had thought of writing, and once actually started a novel in which Mr. Barr, the organist of St. Jude’s, with whom both she and Joanna were in love, was to be saved from his unfortunate weakness for the bottle by a heroine remarkably like Georgie herself in everything except appearance. But in the second chapter unexpected difficulties arose, and at the same time Georgie heard Madame Neruda play at one of Sir Charles Hallé’s concerts. From that day the girl decided that music was her natural means of expression, and the violin her instrument. It was dreadful to think how much time she had already wasted over the piano.