The man from Glasgow, with his round, merry, well-shaven face, a countenance of prosperity, was a typical man of business, and he appealed to old Morrison's widow as a very nice man.
With her estimate Ena, any suspicion utterly disarmed, entirely agreed.
Pleasant, humorous, and careless in his relaxation from money-making in grim and grimy Glasgow, John Greig was an excellent fellow on holiday. His estimate of women--for he was a bachelor--coincided entirely with that of Ena Pollen.
To be frank, he had, in the course of conversation, gauged her views regarding her own sex, and he at once sought to cultivate her acquaintance upon her line of thought.
"Of course," she said next morning, as he found himself gossiping with her after breakfast, "woman ought not to work at all. No man really likes a woman who works for him. Work isn't woman's natural element, though trouble is. Work is an odious word to women."
"Really, Mrs. Pollen, your philosophy is quite upon that of my own thinking," laughed Greig. "Once a man I know declared to me that to girls business life would be a dull existence if it were not for its sly opening for an illicit romance."
"One woman writer has said, and with much truth, that petticoats, like time, were made for slaves, and that there is more virtue in a single pair of trousers than there is in a multitude of skirts," laughed Ena.
"True. Was it not the same lady author who told us that the wrong part of wrong-doing is being found out?"
"Ah! yes. And the same feminine philosopher went farther," Ena said. "She declared that the woman who thinks it wicked to buy silk petticoats and luxurious 'undies'--'because no one sees them'--is a fool; but the hedonist who frankly revels in the feel and _frou-frou_ of silk and _crêpe de chine_ and mysterious lace things is as wise as Eve, who wore leaves rather than nothing, and made a tantalising mystery of herself out of the poor resources at her command."
The man from Glasgow laughed immoderately. "Really," he remarked, "you have no great admiration of your own sex, Mrs. Pollen."
"No, I have not," declared the Red Widow frankly, as they both halted and leaned over a gate which gave entrance to a great green meadow beyond which was the edge of the loch, the water of which lay like a mirror in the morning sunlight.