Scotland -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
Her quivering lips said gallantly to the banged door: "Well, there is my
wurrk. I will forget my petty pairsonal troubles in my wurrk, just as
men do!" And she typed away, squeezing out such drops of pride of
craftsmanship as can be found in that mechanical exercise, making no
mistakes, and ending the lines so that they built up a well-proportioned
page, so intently that she had almost finished before she noticed that
it was funny stuff about a divorce such as Mr. Mactavish James always
gave to one of the male clerks to copy. But that was all the work she
had to do that morning, for Mr. Mactavish James was up at the Court of
Session and Mr. Philip did not send for her. She was obliged to sit in
her idleness as in a bare cell, with nothing to look at but her misery,
which continued to spin like a top, moving perpetually without getting
any further or changing into anything else. Presently she went and knelt
in the windowseat, drawing patterns on the glass and looking up the
side-street at the Castle Rock, which now glowed with a dark pyritic
lustre under the queer autumn day of bright south sunshine and scudding
bruise-coloured clouds, seeing the familiar scene strangely, through a
lens of tears. She fell to thinking out peppered phrases to say of the
client who had told on her. Surely she had as much right in Princes
Street as he had? And if it was too late for her to be there, then it
was too late for him also. "It's just a case of one law for the man and
another for the woman. Och, votes for women!" she cried savagely, and
flogged the window with the blindcord. Ten to one it was yon Mr. Grieve,
the minister of West Braeburn, who fairly blew in your face with
waggishness when you offered him a chair in the waiting-room, and
tee-heed that "a lawyer's office must be a dull place for a young leddy
like you!" Well, she knew what Mr. Mactavish James thought of him for
his dealings with his wife's money....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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