She thought Lucy a very lucky girl; nobody had ever fallen in love with her, and asked her to preside over a college lodge, though she was twice—a dozen times, at least—as clever as Lucy. She couldn't, for her part, think what men saw in Lucy. Cousin Mary often—indeed, she had always—wondered what the Master of St. Benedict's saw in Lucy. Mary had quite given up the lodge long ago. The shabby, old-fashioned bits of furniture that she had taken away with her had all been carried over the college bridge to the little house at Newnham. She had only taken the oldest and the shabbiest things away; she had left everything that was worth leaving at the lodge.
People who had known her well remarked when they came up in October how much she had aged during the Long Vacation. She was not only looking, but she was feeling old and changed. Something had gone out of her life.
The Master of St. Benedict's noticed the change with a little twinge of conscience, but his hands were too full just now to think very much about any other woman than the woman he was going to marry.
The lodge was full of workpeople; the old place was being turned upside down. The plaster and the paint and the whitewash had been scraped off the old oak, and, oh, what a lot of beeswaxing it took to make it brown and mellow with that delightful old dull polish upon it that antiquaries love! There were all sorts of discoveries made during this pulling down and building up of old panelling. Rooms were unearthed, and musty old cupboards and passages laid open, and no end of old windows that had been blocked up for centuries brought to light. Lucy had to come over to see all these discoveries, but Mary never came to the lodge again after the day she left it. That chapter of her life was closed.
Not many people congratulated Lucy on her engagement. Very few people in Cambridge knew of it. Everyone had been expecting the Senior Tutor for years to marry the Master's niece; and when, after the Long Vacation, the engagement was spoken of, nobody ever dreamed it was Lucy.
Mary had very properly gone away from the lodge until she could return as its mistress; and Lucy—well, Lucy had gone back to Newnham to fit herself for her work as a governess. Under these circumstances she got very few congratulations.
Everybody would congratulate her fast enough when the time came. She was not doing a thing that there was no precedent for. Nearly all the heads of the Colleges in Cambridge had married young wives. It was quite the fashion.
It was not so long ago that Fellows of colleges could not marry at all, but now the order had been reversed, and the first use the dear old things made of their new liberty was to marry wives out of the nursery. As the Poet of the University touchingly put it:
'It hath been decreede, that ye Fellowes may wed,
And settle in College walls;
And wake ye echoes of cloistered life,
With their lyttel chyldren's squalls.'
There had been no children's 'squalls' heard in the lodge of St. Benedict's within the memory of the oldest Fellow in the college; no pattering footsteps on the stairs, no children's voices in the long dim galleries, had disturbed its monastic quietness. The Fellows who in their turn had been Masters of St. Benedict's had been old, old Fellows when their turn came, and one only of all their number that anyone living could remember had taken to him a wife.