‘That is paying an exceedingly high compliment to German, ma’am!’
‘And we studied English literature, solidly, not out of little green-backed handbooks. Never a day passed that I did not read Addison, or some other fine Queen Anne writer, aloud to my father. And we knew how to write a letter. And we coloured from Nature, for the love of the thing, exceedingly well, some of us, though there was no South Kensington, and we never called ourselves art students, and, and—Marjorie Bartrand, how did this conversation begin?’
‘Apropos of Spain, did it not?’
‘To be sure. Apropos of your Girton scheme, your wish to see classics and mathematics pushed into a country where women are still content to be women, and very womanly ones. University teaching for girls is a freak that will die out of itself, like coal-scuttle bonnets, bishops’ sleeves, crinoline, or any other mode that is at once cumbersome and unbeautiful.’
Afternoon sunshine was flooding the weather-beaten lichened walls of Tintajeux Manoir. The Atlantic glittered, one vast field of diamonds, until it melted into pallid sky along the southern horizon line. The keen, cool ocean saltness mingled with and almost overbalanced the fragrance of the pinks, heliotropes, and roses in the Reverend Andros Bartrand’s old-fashioned borders. On a garden bench, at some short distance from the house, were seated two ladies, fresh of face, both; countrified of dress; fast friends, although more than forty years stood between their ages. A cedar of Lebanon spread wide its layers of odorous darkness above their heads. A grass plot, emerald green, close shorn, was their carpet.
‘If your wits were your fortune, child, such ambitions might be pardonable.’ So, after a space, the enemy of progress resumed her parable. ‘In families where the olive branches are in excess of the exchequer, the governess, Heaven help her, is expected to “ground” the boys, as they call it, in Latin grammar and Euclid. But with your grandfather’s position, your own inheritance, putting the idea of your marriage aside——’
‘As you know I have put it, for ever and ever!’ cried Marjorie Bartrand, her whole face seeming abruptly transformed into a pair of passionate eyes. ‘Did we not decide long ago, Miss Tighe, that the word mar——, the word I detest so heartily, should never be spoken between us. Allow that I may not be forced, for money, to ground small boys in Latin grammar. Allow that my visions of raising Spanish girls above the level of dolls are as laughable as you all seem to find them. May I not want to bring myself, Marjorie Bartrand, up to the highest improvable point as a human being? Great in mathematics I shall never be.’
‘I am thankful, indeed, to hear you say so,’ remarked Miss Tighe, with an air of relief.
‘But even the Seigneur is forced to confess I might become—a fourth-rate classic! I know French and Spanish, Dogberry wise, by nature. That must help me a long way on the road to Latin. And I have learnt seventeen irregular Greek verbs—I’m not sure about the aorists—and Mademoiselle le Patourel and I went straight through the Apology of Plato, with Bohn’s crib.’