She rose to her feet, moved distractedly about the room, and then, with a purposefulness that put into his stare that terrified cold enmity with which the sane look upon even the beloved mad, she swept two rulers off her desk on to the floor. But she knelt down and set them cross-wise, and then straightened herself and crooked her arms above her head, and began to dance a sword-dance. Even her filial relations to him hardly justified such a puncture of office discipline, and he sat blowing at it until he saw that this was a new phase of her so entertaining misery. It is always absurd when that pert and ferocious dance, invented by an unsensuous race inordinately and mistakenly vain of its knees, is performed by a graceful girl; and Ellen added to that incongruity by dancing languorously, passionately. It was like hearing the wrong words sung to a familiar tune. And her face was at discord with both the dance and her performance of it, for she was fixedly regarding someone who was not there. "She is fey!" he thought tolerantly, and gloated over this fresh display of her unhappiness and his pity, though a corner of his mind was busy hoping that Mr. Morrison would not come in. It was unusual in Edinburgh for a solicitor (at any rate in a sound firm) to sit and watch his typist dancing. But soon she stopped dancing. Her need to speak of Yaverland took away her breath. She slouched across the room to the window, laid her cheek to the glass, and said rapidly, "It is bad weather. It is bad weather here an awful lot of the time. Mr. Yaverland says there is a place in Peru where it is always spring. That would be bonny." She felt relieved and warmed as soon as she had mentioned his name, and sat down easily in the window-seat and smiled back at the old man. "Ehem! So this Mr. Yaverland has surveyed mankind from China to Peru, as the great Dr. Johnson says." But she could not speak of Yaverland again so soon. She tried to make time by wrangling. "Why do you call him the great Dr. Johnson? He was just a rude old thing." "He was a man of sense, lassie, a man of sense." "What's sense?" she cried, and flung wide her arms. Her body pricked with a general emotion that was not relevant to the words she spoke, and indeed she was not quite aware what those were. "Sense isn't sitting in your chair all day and ruining the coats of your--of your digestion drinking too much tea and contradicting everybody and being rude to Mrs. Thrale when the poor body married again." "It was a fule's marriage," said Mr. Mactavish James; "the widow of a substantial man taking up wi' an Italian fiddler."