‘Memory will get one through most exams., Miss Bartrand. You have a good memory?’
‘For all useless things, yes. In “Don Quixote,” for instance, you would find it hard to puzzle me. You know a little Spanish?’
‘Five words at most.’
‘How deplorable! A person who has no Spanish is not quite in possession of his faculties. If one had time to spare in these long summer days, I——’
Marjorie broke off abruptly, colouring to the roots of her hair, as she remembered the existence of her tutor’s wife. A girl not ignorant of Spanish only; a girl who could just overcome the difficulties of the Prayer-book and Lessons, perhaps, or write a letter without any glaringly bad spelling, on a push.
‘If one had time to spare in these long summer days, Miss Bartrand?’
Geoffrey Arbuthnot found a pleasure it had been hard to him to account for in her confusion.
‘I was going to say I would teach you Spanish. As if Spanish mattered! As if there were not nobler, lovelier things in life than book-learning. But that was a real Bartrand idea. We Bartrands, mouldering among our owls in this old place, cannot see daylight clear. We think too much of ourselves. Our minds are as narrow as our garden paths. I teach you Spanish, indeed! I’ll tell you what I call that proposal.’ She leaned across till her sweet bud of a face was close to Geoffrey’s, and spoke with a suspension of the breath. ‘I call it a bit of devilish Bartrand pride and stiff-neckedness.’
Geff started, with a pantomime of horror, from the adjective italicised.