Perhaps other women were not so patient and faithful as the old Master's wife.
Lucy would not have been so patient; she was getting impatient already, now the novelty had worn off. She was not sure that she was doing the best, the very best thing she could with her life; that she was making the most of it, that she was 'arranging' it aright, as they put it at Newnham.
Her heart misgave her as she pictured her future, her prosperous future, as the wife of the Master of St. Benedict's. The quiet, stately life of a college lodge oppressed her. She was sure she should soon weary of its stateliness and its loneliness. She pictured herself sometimes standing at the old oriel window and looking down at the lusty young life in the court below and longing to be in the midst of it. She was longing already. The sight of young lovers in the college Backs filled her heart with a strange tumult, and the sound of a fiddle coming from the open window of a man's room as she passed through the court set her feet twinkling. There is a great deal in heredity.
The Master met her at the lodge one day when she was in this mood. She had been working at mathematics all the morning, and she was nervous and overwrought; she had been feeling a strange depression for several days, and had come over to see the alterations at the lodge in order to shake it off.
The Master took her out into the Fellows' garden to see the new greenhouse. It had been rebuilt, and, late as it was in the season, it was ablaze with Lucy's favourite geraniums. He had considered her taste entirely, and filled it with the flowers of her choice. She ought to have been grateful, at the least, and expressed her gratitude in any of the little pleasant ways that engaged people are wont to express their feelings.
She ought to have gone round sniffing the flowers, and picked the choicest red geranium and stuck it in the Master's coat; but she did nothing of the kind. She sat down on a bench and began to cry. She couldn't keep the tears back.
Perhaps the sight of the new greenhouse had brought to her mind that scene when the old Master had fallen in the garden, and Wyatt Edgell had carried him back to the house.
Lucy couldn't account for her tears. She said it was the air of the greenhouse had made her faint, and her lover walked back with her to Newnham.
'You are sure there is nothing the matter?' the Master said before he left her; he didn't leave her at the gate, he went straight up to the door of Newe Hall with her. 'You are sure that the faintness is quite gone?'