So Georgie was given violin lessons at the school in Bristol, and when, at nineteen, she came home for good, she wandered from teacher to teacher much as her mother wandered from church to church. Each time she meditated a change there were the best reasons for condemning her present instructor, and before very long it came to this, that no one in Glasgow could give her precisely what she needed. There was a man in Dresden … she was certain that if she could only go to Dresden …

“But, dear, you seemed to be getting on so nicely,” Juley pleaded when Germany was first mentioned. “Mrs. Boyd was charmed with the way you played Simple Aveu the other day at the Canal Boatmen’s P.S.A.”

“Mrs. Boyd!” cried Georgie in loud scorn, “What does Mrs. Boyd know about music? She would like Simple Aveu! And that’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you. Simple Aveu is the kind of piece Miss Findlay gives to all her pupils because she thinks it will please their friends to hear them play it in the drawing-room at night – because it’s tuney! Don’t you see that if I’m ever to do anything with my violin – anything real – I must go somewhere where they take music seriously?”

This discussion – one of many – happened one Sunday evening in spring. Juley and her daughters were returning after church from a walk along the Great Western Road, and Joanna seeking a refuge from the distress by her side, found it in the beauty of the world about her. For the Great Western Road at sunset on a fine Sunday is a romantic highway. Once a stranger had stopped Joanna there, and sweeping off his hat, had asked in broken English how soon, continuing westwards, he should get to the sea. The question, though geographically astonishing, gave some expression of the magnanimous charm of the road. Now troops of church-goers, their faces illumined by the glow on the horizon, sauntered westwards; and others with their faces in the shadow returned to the town. Innumerable couples – Highland servants chattering loudly in Gaelic, strings of very young girls in their Sabbath finery, young men with buttonholes and whirling canes, who eyed the girls as they passed – all used the whole breadth of the road for walking, and only moved aside deliberately to make way for a jogging Sunday horse-car.

Joanna steeping her mind in vague dreams tried not to hear what Georgie and her mother were saying. But the argument continued even after they had got home and were waiting in the parlour for supper. Joanna’s silence was taken for granted, and she sat by the window looking out. She still tried not to listen, though it was harder indoors.