The girls ran off to their rooms when the sitting of the House was ended in the highest possible spirits. Some of them sang snatches of songs, and some caught each other round the waist and waltzed madly down corridors. The thing was practically settled. The Bar and the Church opened vistas, immense vistas, for every sort of talent, and especially for the kind of talent that Newnham produced.
There would have to be more colleges for women—Newnham and Girton could not turn out nearly enough—there would have to be a great many Newnhams. Some girls, no doubt, sat down at once and began to prepare a sermon, and others took down Blackstone and began seriously to study law.
Lucy went back to her room alone. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, though she 'kept' next door, wouldn't take the slightest notice of her. She had lighted her lamp, and was just thinking what she would give for a cup of tea, when someone knocked at her door. It wasn't a girl with a cup of tea, as she hoped it might be—the Chancellor of the Exchequer, with all her fine airs, generally brought her in a cup of tea before she went to bed, and sometimes she condescended to sit down for five minutes and discuss the burning questions of the day. It was not the Chancellor of the Exchequer—it was a far greater person—it was the Leader of the House.
'Well?' she said, when she came in and had shut the door after her—'well?'
She had come in so suddenly, and Lucy's mind was so full of the motion of the evening—this Parliamentary business was quite a new thing to her, and she had taken it au serieux—that she could not collect herself sufficiently to think what Pamela meant. Her mind was so full of the lady curates and the female barristers that she looked up at the Leader of the House in bewilderment.
'Well,' said Pamela impatiently, 'how is he? I saw by your face at Hall that he was not dead. Is he going to get well?'
Then Lucy remembered all about it.
'Oh dear!' she said, 'how could I have forgotten! Yes, he is going to get well, I think. He will owe his life if he does to Eric. Oh, Eric has been lovely!'