Scotland -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
"Och, votes for women!" she said wearily; and tried to make herself
remember that after all there were some unstained noble things in the
world by singing whisperingly a verse from the Women's Marseillaise.
"There's many singing that song to-day in prison that would be glad to
sit and breathe fresh air and look at a fine view as you're doing, so
you ought to be thankful!" And indeed the view of the Castle did just
for that moment distract her from the business of weeping, for there had
been a certain violent alteration of the weather. The autumn sunshine,
which had never been more than a sarcasm on the part of a thoroughly
unpleasant day, had failed altogether, and Edinburgh had become a series
of corridors through which there rushed a trampling wind. It set the
dead leaves rising from the pavement in an exasperated, seditious way,
and let them ride dispersedly through the eddying air far above the
heads of the clambering figures that, up and down the side-street, stood
arrested and, it seemed, flattened, as if they had been spatchcocked by
the advancing wind and found great difficulty in folding themselves up
again. She looked at their struggles with contempt. They were funny wee
men. They were not like Yaverland. Now, he was a fine man. She thought
proudly of the enormousness of his chest and shoulders, and imagined the
tremendous thudding thing the heartbeat must be that infused with blood
such hugeness. He must be one of the most glorious men who ever lived.
It surely was not often that a man was perfect in every way physically
and mentally.
She turned away and hid her face against the shutters, weeping bitterly.
But her mind had to follow him in a kind of dream, as he walked on,
masterfully, as one who knows he has the right to come and go, out of
that wet grey street of which she was a part, to wander as he chose in
strange continents, in exotic weathers, through time sequined with
extravagant dawns and sunsets, through space jewelled with towns running
red with blood of revolutions or multi-coloured with carnival. In every
way he was richer than she was, for he had more joy in travelling than
she would have had, since over the scenic world she saw there was cast
for him a nexus of romance which she could not have perceived.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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