He rose when Lucy came in, and made her sit down in her old seat by the window. He wanted her to talk about herself. He was sure she missed his help; she would never be able to pass the Little-go without some more lessons.
They taught beautifully at Newnham. They teach conscientiously at women's colleges: they don't believe in tips and short-cuts, and mere getting up of likely passages; they plod industriously through the dull, dreary round. The Senior Tutor didn't believe in Lucy's plodding; he would have liked to give her a tip or two.
Lucy declined to talk about herself; she was full of the dear old people upstairs, and the affecting scene she had witnessed in the Master's room.
'He is getting weaker every day, in body as well as mind,' the Tutor said thoughtfully. 'He has not had nearly such good nights lately.'
Unconsciously he was keeping a barometric measure of the Master's increasing weakness. It is not an ennobling thing to wait for dead men's shoes.
'No-o,' said Lucy, 'but I hope she will go first;' and then she burst into tears. 'Oh, I don't know how we shall tell her that he is gone!'
'Do you think at her age she would feel it so keenly? The separation could not be long.'
'Oh, you don't know what her love is. It seems only to have grown with the years.'
The Tutor sighed, and looked out of the window into the garden beneath, and his thoughts wandered away to a time long past, when such a love might have been his. Perhaps his fancy had gone back to a brown-haired girl, who had waited for him until her face had grown wan and her eyes sad with waiting, and who had not had Mrs. Rae's patience. Well, she would have been old and florid and stout now, and her sweet face—it was sweet once—would have been seamed and wrinkled with the cares of, oh, so many children!