“You care for poetry, Miss Reston?  In Priorsford it’s considered rather a slur on your character to care for poetry.  Novels we may discuss, sensible people read novels, even now and again essays or biography, but poetry—­there we have to dissemble.  We pretend, don’t we, Jean?—­that poetry is nothing to us.  Never a quotation or an allusion escapes us.  We listen to tales of servants’ misdeeds, we talk of clothes and the ongoings of our neighbours, and we never let on that we would rather talk of poetry.  No.  No.  A daft-like thing for either an old woman or a young one to speak of.  Only when we are alone—­Jean and Augusta and Lewis Elliot and I—­we ’tire the sun with talking and send it down the sky.’ ...  Miss Reston, Lewis Elliot tells me he knew you very well at one time.”

“Yes, away at the beginning of things.  I adored him when I was fifteen and he was twenty.  He was wonderfully good to me and Biddy—­my brother.  It is delightful to find an old friend in a new place.”

“I’m very fond of Lewis,” said Mrs. Hope, “but I wish to goodness he had never inherited Laverlaw.  He might have done a lot in the world with his brain and his heart and his courage, but there he is contentedly settled in that green glen of his, and greatly absorbed in sheep.  Sheep!  The country is run by the Sir John Bankses, and the Lewis Elliots think about sheep.  It’s all wrong.  It’s all wrong.  The War wakened him up, and he was in the thick of it both in the East and in France, but never in the limelight, you understand, just doggedly doing his best in the background.  If he would marry a sensible wife with some ambition, but he’s about as much sentiment in him as Jock.  It would take an earthquake to shake him into matrimony.”

“Perhaps,” said Pamela, “he is like your friend Mirren—­’bye caring.’”

“Nonsense,” said Mrs. Hope briskly.  “He’s ‘bye’ the fervent stage, if he ever was a prisoner in that cage of rushes, which I doubt, but there are long years before him, I hope, and if there isn’t a fire of affection on the hearth, and someone always about to listen and understand, it’s a dowie business when the days draw in and the nights get longer and colder, and the light departs.”

“But if it’s dreary for a man,” said Pamela, “what of us?  What of the ‘left ladies,’ as I heard a child describe spinsters?”

Mrs. Hope’s blue eyes, callously calm, surveyed the three spinsters before her.

“You will get no pity from me,” she said.  “It’s practically always the woman’s own fault if she remains unmarried.  Besides, a woman can do fine without a man.  A woman has so much within herself she is a constant entertainment to herself.  But men are helpless souls.  Some of them are born bachelors and they do very well, but the majority are lost without a woman.  And angry they would be to hear me say it!...  Are you going, Jean?”

“Mhor’s lessons,” said Jean.  “I’m frightfully sorry to take Pamela away.”