‘I believe I got through some fair work yesterday,’ she remarked, with an air of cold business. ‘As to-morrow is to be wasted on folly, we may as well lose no time now. It is your system never to praise, sir,—a good one, doubtless. Yet I hope you will think my Virgil passable. I promise you it was done without the crib.’
Geff read the halting translation aloud, no longer holding the manuscript upside down. He did not think Marjorie’s Virgil passable, and put the copy-book aside without a word of comment. He showed himself severer than usual over Greek aorists, was stringent, to cruelty, in regard of Marjorie’s shakiest point—her mathematics. But at last, when the professional work was over, when he had risen to take leave, Geoffrey Arbuthnot extended his hand to his pupil as the girl’s heart knew he had never done before.
‘You have tolerated me hitherto,’ he observed, ‘for my imaginary wife’s sake. Do you think you can tolerate me, in future, for my own?’
With his eyes fixed on her face, her small fingers crushed in his grasp, Marjorie’s cheeks turned the colour of a pomegranate.
‘You know ... you ought to have been the other Arbuthnot cousin,’ she stammered, glancing up under her long lashes, then drawing her hand away warily.
‘I ought, you think, to have been Gaston? He would never have pleaded, as I plead, for toleration. Every woman living would tolerate Gaston of her own free will.’
‘Save Marjorie Bartrand! Pray make one exception to your rule. I come of an arbitrary and stiff-necked race. We—we Tintajeux people belong to minorities. We like, in most cases dislike, where we can.’
‘Give me credit, for a short time longer, of being the other Arbuthnot cousin,’ Geoffrey whispered as he left her. ‘Dislike me only as much as you did on that first evening when you gathered roses and heliotropes—for my wife!’