"Father, you'll have to speak to yon Melville girl."
Mr. Mactavish James did not raise his eyes, but enquired with the faintest threat of mockery, "What's she been doing to you, Philip?"
"She's not been doing anything to me. What could she do? But I've just seen her in Princes Street with yon fellow Yaverland, the client from Rio. They were coming out of the station and they took a cab."
"You can't have a typist prancing about with clients at this time of night."
"It's airly yet," said Mr. Mactavish James mildly, continuing to turn over the pages of the _Law Journal_. "We've not had our dinners yet. Though from the way the smell of victuals is roaring up the back stairs we shouldn't be long."
"Father, people were looking at them. They--they were holding hands." He forced himself to believe the lie. "You can't have her carrying on like that with clients. It'll give the office a bad name."
At last his father raised his eyes, which, though bleared with age, were still the windows of a sceptical soul, and let them fall. "Ellen is a good girl, Philip," he said.
The young man began a gesture of despair, which he restrained lest those inimical eyes should lift again. This was not a place, he well knew, where sentimental values held good, where the part of a young and unprotected girl would be taken against the son of the house out of any mawkish feeling that youth or weakness of womanhood deserved especial tenderness. It was the stronghold of his own views, its standards were his own. And even here it was insisted that Ellen was a person of value. There seemed nothing in the world that would give him any help in his urgent need to despise her, to think of her as dirt, to throw on her the onus of all the vileness that had happened to him. He broke out, "If she's a good girl she ought to behave as such! You must speak to her, father. There'll be a scandal in the town!"
Mr. Mactavish James seemed to have withdrawn his mind from the discussion, for he had taken out his appointment diary, which could surely have nothing to do with the case. But when Mr. Philip had turned towards the door, the old man said, amiably enough, "Ay, I'll speak to Nelly. I'll speak to her on Monday afternoon. The morning I must be up at the Court of Session. But in the afternoon I'll give the girl a word."