The situation is too poignant to be easily recorded. One has heard of a wife oppressed and disgusted by a dissipated husband; one has heard of the horrors of a drunkard’s home. But this was a different thing. So far as any one in the house was aware, these young men were not drunkards. There were no dreadful scenes in which they lost control of themselves or the possession of their senses. Was it almost worse than that? Mrs Ogilvy felt as if she were being put through the treatment which some people suppose to be a cure for that terrible weakness, the mixture of intoxicating spirit with every meal and every dish. Her very cup of tea, the old lady’s modest indulgence, seemed to be flavoured from the eternal whisky-bottle which was always there, the smell and the sight of which made her sick, made her frantic with suppressed misery. They meant no harm, she tried to explain to herself. It was a habit of their rough life, and the much exercise and fatigue to which they subjected themselves, for good or for evil, in the far-away place from which they had come, the outskirts of civilisation. They were not capable of understanding what it was to her to see her trim dining-room always made disorderly (as she felt) by that bottle, the atmosphere flavoured with it, its presence always manifest. The pipes, too: her mantelpiece, always so nicely arranged with its clock, its flower-vases, its shells and ornaments, was now encumbered and dusty with pipes, with ashes of cigars, with cans and papers of tobacco: how they would have laughed had they known what a vexation this was! or rather Robbie would have been angry--he would have said it was one of her ridiculous ways--and only the other would have laughed. It is a little hard to have your son speak of your ridiculous ways before another man who is indulgent and laughs. But still the pipes were nothing in comparison with that other thing--the bottle of whisky always there. What would the grocer in Eskholm think, from whom she got her supplies, when, instead of the small discreet bottle at long intervals--for not to have whisky in the house, the old-fashioned Scotch remedy for so many things, would have seemed to Mrs Ogilvy almost a crime--there were gallon jars, she did not like to ask Andrew how many, supplied to the Hewan? The idea that it was not respectable cut into her like a knife. And it would be thought that it was Robbie who consumed all that,--Robbie, who was known to be there, yet never had been seen in Eskholm, or taking his walks like other sober folk on Eskside.