When it was known that I had begun another story my mother might ask what it was to be about this time.

‘Fine we can guess who it is about,’ my sister would say pointedly.

‘Maybe you can guess, but it is beyond me,’ says my mother, with the meekness of one who knows that she is a dull person.

My sister scorned her at such times. ‘What woman is in all his books?’ she would demand.

‘I’m sure I canna say,’ replies my mother determinedly. ‘I thought the women were different every time.’

‘Mother, I wonder you can be so audacious! Fine you know what woman I mean.’

‘How can I know? What woman is it? You should bear in mind that I hinna your cleverness’ (they were constantly giving each other little knocks).

‘I won’t give you the satisfaction of saying her name. But this I will say, it is high time he was keeping her out of his books.’

And then as usual my mother would give herself away unconsciously. ‘That is what I tell him,’ she says chuckling, ‘and he tries to keep me out, but he canna; it’s more than he can do!’

On an evening after my mother had gone to bed, the first chapter would be brought upstairs, and I read, sitting at the foot of the bed, while my sister watched to make my mother behave herself, and my father cried H’sh! when there were interruptions. All would go well at the start, the reflections were accepted with a little nod of the head, the descriptions of scenery as ruts on the road that must be got over at a walking pace (my mother did not care for scenery, and that is why there is so little of it in my books). But now I am reading too quickly, a little apprehensively, because I know that the next paragraph begins with - let us say with, ‘Along this path came a woman’: I had intended to rush on here in a loud bullying voice, but ‘Along this path came a woman’ I read, and stop. Did I hear a faint sound from the other end of the bed? Perhaps I did not; I may only have been listening for it, but I falter and look up. My sister and I look sternly at my mother. She bites her under-lip and clutches the bed with both hands, really she is doing her best for me, but first comes a smothered gurgling sound, then her hold on herself relaxes and she shakes with mirth.

‘That’s a way to behave!’ cries my sister.

‘I cannot help it,’ my mother gasps.

‘And there’s nothing to laugh at.’

‘It’s that woman,’ my mother explains unnecessarily.

‘Maybe she’s not the woman you think her,’ I say, crushed.

‘Maybe not,’ says my mother doubtfully. ‘What was her name?’

‘Her name,’ I answer with triumph, ‘was not Margaret’; but this makes her ripple again. ‘I have so many names nowadays,’ she mutters.

‘H’sh!’ says my father, and the reading is resumed.

Perhaps the woman who came along the path was of tall and majestic figure, which should have shown my mother that I had contrived to start my train without her this time. But it did not.

‘What are you laughing at now?’ says my sister severely. ‘Do you not hear that she was a tall, majestic woman?’

‘It’s the first time I ever heard it said of her,’ replies my mother.

‘But she is.’

‘Ke fy, havers!’

‘The book says it.’

‘There will be a many queer things in the book. What was she wearing?’

I have not described her clothes. ‘That’s a mistake,’ says my mother. ‘When I come upon a woman in a book, the first thing I want to know about her is whether she was good-looking, and the second, how she was put on.’

The woman on the path was eighteen years of age, and of remarkable beauty.

‘That settles you,’ says my sister.

‘I was no beauty at eighteen,’ my mother admits, but here my father interferes unexpectedly. ‘There wasna your like in this countryside at eighteen,’ says he stoutly.

‘Pooh!’ says she, well pleased.

‘Were you plain, then?’ we ask.

‘Sal,’ she replies briskly, ‘I was far from plain.’

‘H’sh!’

Perhaps in the next chapter this lady (or another) appears in a carriage.

‘I assure you we’re mounting in the world,’ I hear my mother murmur, but I hurry on without looking up. The lady lives in a house where there are footmen - but the footmen have come on the scene too hurriedly. ‘This is more than I can stand,’ gasps my mother, and just as she is getting the better of a fit of laughter, ‘Footman, give me a drink of water,’ she cries, and this sets her off again. Often the readings had to end abruptly because her mirth brought on violent fits of coughing.

Sometimes I read to my sister alone, and she assured me that she could not see my mother among the women this time. This she said to humour me. Presently she would slip upstairs to announce triumphantly, ‘You are in again!’

Or in the small hours I might make a confidant of my father, and when I had finished reading he would say thoughtfully, ‘That lassie is very natural. Some of the ways you say she had - your mother had them just the same. Did you ever notice what an extraordinary woman your mother is?’

Then would I seek my mother for comfort. She was the more ready to give it because of her profound conviction that if I was found out - that is, if readers discovered how frequently and in how many guises she appeared in my books - the affair would become a public scandal.

‘You see Jess is not really you,’ I begin inquiringly.

‘Oh no, she is another kind of woman altogether,’ my mother says, and then spoils the compliment by adding naively, ‘She had but two rooms and I have six.’

I sigh. ‘Without counting the pantry, and it’s a great big pantry,’ she mutters.

This was not the sort of difference I could greatly plume myself upon, and honesty would force me to say, ‘As far as that goes, there was a time when you had but two rooms yourself - ’

‘That’s long since,’ she breaks in. ‘I began with an up-the-stair, but I always had it in my mind - I never mentioned it, but there it was - to have the down-the-stair as well. Ay, and I’ve had it this many a year.’

‘Still, there is no denying that Jess had the same ambition.’

‘She had, but to her two-roomed house she had to stick all her born days. Was that like me?’

‘No, but she wanted - ’

‘She wanted, and I wanted, but I got and she didna. That’s the difference betwixt her and me.’

‘If that is all the difference, it is little credit I can claim for having created her.’

My mother sees that I need soothing. ‘That is far from being all the difference,’ she would say eagerly. ‘There’s my silk, for instance. Though I say it mysel, there’s not a better silk in the valley of Strathmore. Had Jess a silk of any kind - not to speak of a silk like that?’

‘Well, she had no silk, but you remember how she got that cloak with beads.’

‘An eleven and a bit! Hoots, what was that to boast of! I tell you, every single yard of my silk cost - ’

‘Mother, that is the very way Jess spoke about her cloak!’

She lets this pass, perhaps without hearing it, for solicitude about her silk has hurried her to the wardrobe where it hangs.

‘Ah, mother, I am afraid that was very like Jess!’

‘How could it be like her when she didna even have a wardrobe? I tell you what, if there had been a real Jess and she had boasted to me about her cloak with beads, I would have said to her in a careless sort of voice, “Step across with me, Jess and I’ll let you see something that is hanging in my wardrobe.” That would have lowered her pride!’

‘I don’t believe that is what you would have done, mother.’

Then a sweeter expression would come into her face. ‘No,’ she would say reflectively, ‘it’s not.’

‘What would you have done? I think I kn............