"Oh, but Ann, don't hurry on so. You must put in about the boys doing so well at school and getting scholarships and almost educating themselves. It might spur on that lazy little Rory to hear about them ... and you grew up." "My growing up wasn't much of an event," said Ann. "Indeed it was something of a disaster. I had been rather attractive-looking as a schoolgirl because my hair fluffed out round my face, but when I put it up I dragged it all back into a little tightly hair-pinned bump. The change was startling. I was like a skinned rabbit. The boys hung umbrellas on the bump and the church people came to you and asked you to make me let down my hair again because they couldn't bear the look of me. And I wore a thick brown coat and a brown hat with red in it, and I had no more notion how to dress myself becomingly than a Kaffir woman. I was a poor little object and I knew it. Then one night I went to a party--an ordinary Glasgow party, full of jokes and good things to eat--and there I met an artist; I suppose she would be about thirty--I longed prodigiously to be thirty when I was eighteen; it seemed to me the ideal age--and she wore a wonderful flowing gown, and her red hair was parted in the middle and lay in a great knot of gold at the nape of her neck. I had never seen anything like this before--all your friends had their hair tightly and tidily done up and wore bodices with lots of bones--and I sat and worshipped. I suppose she had recognised worship in the eyes of the awkward, ill-dressed young girl, for she came and sat beside me and talked to me and asked what I meant to do in the world. I hadn't thought of doing anything, I told her; I had a lot of brothers and a busy mother, and I helped at home. She told me she would like to paint me, and I was flattered beyond belief and promised to go to her studio the very next day. Margot Stronach and everything about her were a revelation to me. I thought her flat--which was probably rather tawdry and pinned together: she confessed to me that she seldom bothered to sew things--the last word in Art. Divans made out of discarded feather beds, polished floors, white walls and blue jars with cape gooseberries--what could one want more? I felt my clothes singularly out of place in such surroundings, and I gave you no peace until I had got a long straight-hanging white frock with gold embroideries which the boys called my nightgown and in which I felt perfectly happy. Margot certainly did improve my appearance vastly, you must admit that, Mother. She made me take a few dozen hairpins out of my poor hair, part it in the middle and fold it lightly back, and she taught me the value of line, but she turned me for the time being into a very affected, posing young person. It was then that I turned your nice comfortable Victorian drawing-room upside down and condemned you as a family to semi-darkness! I can't think why you were so patient with me.