“Och, no, thank you, Mr. Lindsay.”

They had come to the end of Ellen’s shopping list and she was taking him home through St. Patrick’s Square.  “Look at that lighted window, where they’ve got a blue blind!  That’s where de Quincey stopped!” she said excitedly, and he answered, “Oh, is it?...  I say, why did the old chap offer to give you change in halfpence?”

“Well, to-morrow’s Sunday, you see.”

“I’m afraid I don’t.  I’m stupid.  Why do you want halfpence more on Sunday than on any other day?”

“Why, for the plate.  For the collection.  In church.  But we always put in threepenny-bits.  Mother’s picked up a lot of English ways.  What’s taken you?” She stared up in wonder at his laughter, until it broke on her that she had unwittingly given him, an Englishman, food for the silly English taunt that the Scotch are mean.  “Och, you don’t understand,” she began to stammer hastily.  “I didn’t mean that exactly.”

And then a hot rage came on her.  Why should she make excuses for her own people, because this stranger who was less than nothing to her chose to giggle?  Wasn’t he using his size, which was sheer luck, his experiences in foreign lands, of which she was bitterly jealous, and his maleness, which until she got a vote was a ground for hostility, to “come it over” her?  She said acidly, “I’m glad you’re amused.  I suppose you don’t do such things in England?” and at his laughing answer, “I don’t know; I’ve never been to Church in England.  But I shouldn’t think so,” her neatly-brushed and braided temper came down.  She came to a sudden stop.  They were on the unfrequented pavement of Buccleuch Place, a street of tall houses separated by so insanely wide a cobbled roadway that it had none of the human, close-pressed quality of a street, but was desolate with the natural desolation of a ravine, and under these windowed cliffs she danced with rage, a tiny figure of fury with a paper-bag flapping from each hand like a pendulous boxing-glove, while he stood in front of her in a humble, pinioned attitude, keeping his elbows close to his side lest he should drop any parcels.

He loved every word of it, from the moment she explosively told him that it was all very well to hee-haw up there like a doited giraffe, and his mind felt the same pleasure that the palate gets out of a good curry as she told him that the English were a miserable, decadent people who were held together only by the genius and application of the Scotch, that English industry was dependent for its existence on Scotch engineers, and that English education consisted solely of Univairsities that were no more than genteel athletic clubs, and begged him to consider the implication of the fact that the Scotch, though a smaller people than the English, had defended a larger country....

He woke up at that.  He had been tranced in a pleasant reverie, for though she was angry he knew that she would not get too angry.  She was running away from him, but in a circle.