"Oh, I don't know," she cried, and she sat for a long time in deep thought.
As I sat by her side in the picture-house tea-room I recollected a saying of her's one day last week. I was sitting at the bothy door reading The New Age, and at my feet lay The Nation and The New Statesman. She picked up The Nation and glanced at its pages.
"I don't know why you waste your money on papers like that," she said petulantly. "You spend eighteenpence a week on papers, and father only gets John Bull and The People's Journal."
It suddenly came to me that Margaret was not thinking of the money side of the question at all; what annoyed her was the thought that these papers were a symbol of a world that she did not know. And now I wonder whether woman is not always jealous of a man's work. It is a long time since I read Antony and Cleopatra, but I half fancy that Cleopatra was much more jealous of Antony's work than of his wife.
VI.
Dickie Gibson cut me dead to-night, and I think that Jim Jackson will one day look the other way when I pass. It is very sad, and I feel to-night that all my work was in vain. I cannot, however, blame Macdonald this time, for Dickie has left the school. I feel somewhat grieved at not being able to lay the fault at Macdonald's door. I should blame myself if I honestly could, but I cannot, for Dickie was a lad who loved the school.
I recollect the morning when we arrived to find a huge stone cast in the middle of the pond.
"It's been some of the big lads," said Dickie.