‘I see her with my mind’s eye. Geoffrey, accept my condolences. All these classico-mathematical girls,’ observed Gaston, ‘are the same. Much nose, little hair, freckles, ankles. Let the conversation be changed.’
‘Marjorie has too little rather than too much nose, and is certainly too dark for freckles. It seems, Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot, that you have grown cynical in these latter days. If I were a girl again I should be wild to become a pupil of Mr. Geoffrey’s—if he would have me. I should adore classics and mathematics, a touch of science even! Positively, I think one ought to have a smattering of biology, just as one ought to attend the ambulance classes. But we may cultivate the Graces also. Now, Marjorie carries everything to extremes. Perhaps that is only another way of saying Marjorie is a Bartrand.’
‘And the Bartrands, you hinted, are, as a race, handsome?’
Never was man surer of carrying his point, by oblique if not by direct means, than Gaston Arbuthnot.
‘Handsome, stiff-necked, unrelenting. I am not talking scandal against Queen Elizabeth, mind. If I said this in their presence, both Marjorie and her terrible grandfather would feel flattered. Something softer the child may perhaps have inherited from her Spanish mother.’
(‘A Spanish mother!’ interpolated Gaston, in speculative parenthesis. ‘Southern eyes flashing at you from the handsome Bartrand face!’)
‘But Marjorie has the true family temper. She knows too much. She ascribes the worst motives to every one. She cannot forgive. About a twelvemonth ago, when the girl really ought to have been in the schoolroom, there was an unhappy little love story afloat in Guernsey.’
‘A lover who was unworthy of her, of course?’
‘That sort of thing happens to many of us,’ said Linda, examining the stitching of her kerchief, ‘and yet we women manage to forget our own wrongs and to tolerate humanity for the remainder of our lives. Marjorie, reckoning pounds, shillings, and pence by our modest insular standard, is an heiress. Well, she despises the very name of man now, because a certain rather mercenary Major Tredennis sought to marry her for her money.’
‘And intends to be revenged upon us from the awful heights of Plato and conic sections! Geff, my boy, I don’t envy you as much as I did a quarter of an hour ago.’