She handed him the letter and he fumbled with it. “Here it is. ‘I do not see myself why this should prejudice in any way his going up to the University.’ That’s what the headmaster says. But I don’t really see how we could manage it. After all, what would happen? He would have to go to a crammer’s and everyone would ask questions. We have always said how good the Fernhurst education is, and now they’ll begin to wonder why we’ve changed our minds. If we take Roland away and send him to a crammer’s they would be sure to think something was up. You know what people are. It would never do.”
“No, I suppose not. But it seems rather hard on Roland if he’s got to give up Oxford.”
“Well, it will be his own fault, won’t it?”
“We haven’t heard the whole story yet.”
“I know; but what’s the good of discussing it? He knew he was doing something he ought not to be doing. He can’t expect not to have to pay for it.”
And there was another pause.
“He was doing so well, too,” she said.
“He would have been a prefect after the summer. He would have been captain of his house. We should have been so proud of him.”
“And it’s all over now.”
They did not discuss the actual trouble. He knew that on the next day he would have to go over the whole thing with Roland, and he wanted to be able to think it out in quiet. They were practical people, who had spent the last fifteen years discussing the practical affairs of ways and means. They had come nearest to each other when they had sat before their account-books in the evening, balancing one column with another, and at the end of it looking each other in the face, agreeing that they would have to “cut down this expense,” and that they could “save a little there.” The love of the senses had died out quickly between them, but its place had been taken by a deep affection, by the steady accumulation of small incidents of loyalty and unselfishness, of difficulties faced and fought together. They had never ventured upon first principles. They had fixed their attention upon the immediate necessities of the moment.