"That's true," said Marget, "but I think the puir bodies had leeved on cocoa. Sic a cocoa-tins they left in a press!"
"Ann," said Mrs. Douglas, "I've just been thinking, you should tell about old Christina in my _Life_. She was a most interesting character."
Ann shook her head as she rose from the tea-table. "I've too many old women in it already. Besides, I'm not going to write just now. I'm going to lie in the most comfortable chair the room contains and read an article in the _Times Literary Supplement_ called 'Love and Shakespeare.' Does that sound good enough?"
The next evening when Ann sat down with an air of determination at the writing-table she asked: "Shall I make another stride, Mother? Go on another seven years? It's fine to wear seven-league boots and stride about as one likes among the years. What I ought to do, really, before I write any more, is to read one of the books Mr. Philip Scott sent me this morning. They are lives of different people, and he thinks they might help me a lot with yours."
"It was kind of him to send them," Mrs. Douglas said.
"Oh, thoughtful, right enough, as Glasgow people say. I shall thank him in a sentence I found in Montaigne--here it is. 'They who write lives,' says Montaigne, 'by reason that they take more notice of counsels than events, more of what proceeds from within doors than of what happens without ... are the fittest for my perusal.' Mr. Scott will be rather impressed, I should think."
Mrs. Douglas appeared to take little interest in Montaigne. She was looking over a book that Mr. Sharp had brought her to read that afternoon.
"Mr. Sharp was telling me," she said presently, "how good the Miss Scotts are about helping with anything in the village. He is very keen about getting up a club for the young men, and he told them about it, and they at once promised to have that empty house at the top of the village put in order, and their nephew, Mr. Philip Scott, sent a sum of money and is going to supply papers and books and magazines. Mr. Sharp was quite excited about it, quite boyish and slangy when he told me about the football and cricket clubs he hoped to start; you would hardly have known him for the shy, douce young man coming solemnly as a parson to talk to an old woman. I hadn't realised how young he was until to-day."