It was not that Joanna made any prudish objections. In a sense she even listened. But while she continued as in childhood to hoard the correct and the incorrect together in the dark chambers of her mind she by nature ignored all that made the telling savoury to Mabel. If she was still amazingly ignorant about life it was not exactly from lack of information. At Duntarvie she had been in close touch with nature. In Glasgow she had been allowed to play in the streets. Juley was no believer in ignorance for young people. She had even approached Joanna once or twice with an attempt at definite enlightenment. But Joanna had shied so badly and so persistently that at length she was left to herself. She would not have it that her very considerable knowledge of natural processes should in any real way affect the love-fantasy in which she now had her being. Constantly and to the full she indulged herself in the drug-habit of maidenhood; but her waking dreams were quite as innocent as they were sensuous. What she learned from Mabel therefore was kept jealously shrouded. It was no more true to her than it was true that members of the Young Men’s Christian Association, because they were men, were potential lovers.

Yet all the time a lover was what she unceasingly sought. In the streets, at church, on tram-cars and steamers, at concerts, even at religious meetings, Joanna was for ever seeking faces that would suit the hero’s part in those dreams of which the constant heroine was herself. In any kind of assemblage there was sure to be one such face at least, and when she had found it she knew a dozen ways by which to induce immediate delirium. She need only, for instance, recall with closed eyes a moonlight cruise on the Clyde the midsummer before. The paddle steamer loaded with embracing lovers had churned phosphorescently through the black lochs. The band had played dance music. At intervals the spray of fainting rockets had been shaken down the dark sky.