Chapter III: I (3)

Perhaps if she could go to some new country she would escape from this misery. She saw a sky like stretched blue silk, stamped with the black monograms of palms; a purple bay shaped like a shell and edged with a white embroidery of surf. Surely such fair weather killed with sweetness such coarse plants as her stupid gloom, as the foul weather here killed with its coarseness all sweet-flowering southern plants. She turned to Yaverland to ask him if he could help her to find work abroad, but she became aware that she was in the grip of an unreasonable emotion that prevented her from this. It was as horrible to her to see the coldly logical apparatus of her mind churning out these irrational conclusions as it would have been for her to find her mother babbling in drunkenness; and this feeling that for Yaverland to know of her misery would be a culminating humiliation that she could not face seemed disgustingly mad. So she threw herself into a black drowse of misery unfeatured by specific ideas, until she began to think smilingly of the way his eyebrows grew; they were very thick and dark and perfectly level save for a piratical twist in the middle. But she became conscious that he was standing over her, and her heart almost stopped. He said, "I think we're just coming into Edinburgh." There was no reason why she should feel chilled and desolate when he said that. She must be going out of her mind.

And he, since she had shown by the simplicity of her movements that she was not afraid of him, was quite happy.

He could see the picture of himself sitting beside the sleeping child as if it were printed in three colours on glossy paper. But he was a little troubled lest she had walked too far, and as they went up the stone steps from the station to Princes Street he bent over her and asked in a tone of tenderness that he enjoyed using, "Are you tired?"

"Oh, very tired," said Ellen, drooping her head, and aping a fatigue greater than anything she had ever felt in all her young life.