Giles felt it so. He elucidated the financial differences of the family. “We’ve all got a little. He went into the city, into stock-broking, and was making a very good thing of it. He could very well afford to marry.”
“And do you not care for stock-broking?”
“No; I care for philosophy. Unlucky for my wife, isn’t it, Alix?”
“I do not know. Perhaps not if she had taste. One can do so much with very little money if one has taste. But would they know—the others—if she had to live in Oxford, that her hats and dresses were different?”
“Oh—I expect women always know that—even the wives of philosophers!” laughed Giles.
In spite of her æsthetic deficiencies, she felt that she kept up his spirits.
For tea they went to a professor friend—a real professor this time—who had known Mrs. Bradley’s father. Everybody seemed to have known Mrs. Bradley’s father. He lived in the Banbury Road with two unmarried daughters, and was old but robust and bearded and jovial, and he kept a hand on Giles’s shoulder for a long time and promised Mrs. Bradley good things of him.
Giles stood and smiled and promised nothing. She had an impression of his strength and self-knowledge.
Monsieur le professeur’s daughters were middle-aged ladies with lean red faces and grey hair strained tightly back above their ears and clothes of which all that could be said was that they were warm and clean. So tall, so spare they were, the pair of them, so rigid and with such ingenuous eyes, that they made Alix think of the elongated figures on the western portals of Chartres; only the Misses Cockburn were not beautiful in their strangeness and had none of the exquisite chinoiserie of aspect upon which Maman and monsieur Villanelle had discoursed on that summer afternoon when they had visited the great cathedral. How it all rushed over her as she sat at the little table Miss Jennifer had placed for her near the window! She saw them all three, Maman in white under her white sunshade, in the hot French sunlight before the sublime object. Up into the blue it went, august, almost terrifying, so beautiful that it made one want to cry. And as they had wandered in and out, into the vast, illuminated darkness where the rose windows hung like apparitions, out into the fretted portals with the sunlight washing up their steps, Maman had told her of a Queen Alix who had borne a part in its history. Her heart contracted as she remembered it all. Maman might have been one of those queens. She so belonged to Chartres. When Chartres was in one’s blood, what could one feel for Oxford?
She had time for these comparisons. The Misses Cockburn were kind, but they paid no attention to her beyond carefully feeding her; as if, she reflected, she had been a pet dog led in by Mrs. Bradley. People in England, she had already surmised, did not feel an obligation to entertain, further than by feeding, other people’s friends.