So, chattering like that, they came to the business of shopping. It was, he thought, an extravagantly charming business. As well as any other place on earth did he like this homely street, with its little low shops that sent into the frosty air savoury smells of what they sold, and took the chill off the moonlight with their yellow gas-jets. He liked its narrow pavements thronged with shaggy terrier-like people who walked briskly on short legs; he liked its cobbled roadway, along which passed at intervals tramcars that lumbered along more slowly than any other trams in the world, with an air of dignity which intimated that their slowness was due to no mechanical defect, but to a sagacity which was aware that in this simple town nobody was doing anything more urgent than going home to supper.
It seemed a courageous little city as it lay at the base of the towering black and silver Northern night: a brave kindling of comfort in the midst of the indifferent universe. And Ellen's shopping manner, her east wind descent on salesmen, showed that she participated in the hardy quality of her surroundings. In the first shop she was still too much aware of him to get into her stride. It was a bakery--such a marvellously stocked bakery as could be found only in the land of that resourceful people, which, finding itself too poor to have bread and circuses, set about to make a circus of its bread. She bought a shepherd's bap, its pale smooth crust velvety with white flour, and an iced cake that any other nation would have thought prodigious save for a wedding or a christening, while she smiled deprecatingly at him, as though she felt these were mawkish foods to be buying in the company of a friend of bruisers. But in the butcher's shop the Saturday night fever seized her, and presently Yaverland, who had been staring at a bullock's carcase and liking the lovely springing arch of the ribs, was startled to hear her cry, "Mr. Lawson, you surprise me!" But it was only the price of a piece of a neck of mutton that had surprised her. After that he listened to the conversation that passed between her and the shopmen, and found it as different from the bland English chatter of such occasions as if it had been in a different tongue. It had the tweedy texture of Scotch talk, the characteristic lack of suavity and richness in sense, in casual informativeness, in appositeness. Here, it was plain, was a people almost demoniac with immense, unsensual, intellectual energy.