That compliment had puzzled her. On occasion she had felt that something she had written was mildly original, but insight was a strong word and suggested so much more. Mere students, surely, did not have insights. They had ideas, scraped together perhaps, but those ideas were usually no more than a mish-mash of what they picked up through reading the books and articles of those who really did have insights, scholars at the Courtauld, for example, or people like Duncan Macmillan, who wrote such entertaining and forceful art criticism in the paper. Professor Macmillan no doubt woke up each morning with his head full of insights, whereas she woke up in the morning with her head full of … well, she would have to say that it was not really full of anything at all first thing in the morning: thoughts of breakfast, perhaps, or thoughts of who would get to the bathroom first and take all the hot water before the others got up. So if any insights were to come her way, they would have to take their place in the queue of other concerns, most of which were really rather mundane and hardly insightful at all.

As she walked along Middle Meadow Walk, she was, in fact, reflecting on the difficulty she was experiencing in marshalling insights for her honours dissertation. She had agonised over the choice of subject before coming up with what might prove to be a fertile source of insights, or might not. The idea had come to her when she was standing in front of Sir David Wilkie’s painting The Letter of Introduction in the National Gallery of Scotland. She knew the painting well, of course, having been first shown it when she was twelve, and had been taken round the Gallery on the Mound on a wet Saturday afternoon. Her father, who had been showing her round, had pointed out Wilkie’s painting and she had looked at it solemnly, a few drops of rain still making their way off her hair and coursing slowly down her cheeks. They had been caught in a shower and her hair had got thoroughly wet.

‘That,’ said Dr Macgregor, ‘is a very emotionally charged painting. Do you know what emotionally charged means?’

She had looked up at the painting. A young man stood awkwardly by the side of an older, seated man. The older man was holding a letter that had been given to him and was looking up from it. His gaze was not directed at his visitor, but went somewhere off to the side, in annoyance and suspicion.

‘He doesn’t like him,’ she observed. ‘That man sitting down isn’t pleased that the other man has come to see him.’

‘Exactly,’ said Dr Macgregor. ‘And we know that from his eyes, don’t we? And look at his dog. Even his dog is suspicious. You can more or less hear him sniffing.’