A resonant call from Marjorie summoned them before long to the tea-table—a meal at which old Andros with his grand-seigneur air made his guest pleasantly welcome. The dinner-hour at Tintajeux was five, the ‘late dinner’ of Andros Bartrand’s youth. By half-past eight, in this keen Atlantic air, broiled mullet, hot potato scones, with other indigenous Guernsey dishes, were adjuncts to the tea-table which no healthily-minded person could afford to despise. Afterwards came a cigar smoked just inside the open French windows. ‘At a hundred years old,’ the Seigneur apologised, ‘there was one thing a man might not brave with impunity—night air.’ And then Geoffrey Arbuthnot prepared to take his leave.
Business-like, he reverted to pounds, shillings, and pence. It was a settled thing that he should read classics and mathematics with Miss Bartrand on three mornings of the week, at the sum (happily the darkness veiled the blushes on Marjorie’s face) of six francs an hour.
‘Classics and mathematics!’ cried old Andros, assenting to the money part of the transaction with suave courtesy. ‘What will the little witch do with classics and mathematics when she has got them?’
‘Enter Newnham or Girton with them, in the first place,’ answered Marjorie unhesitatingly.
‘Newnham or Girton!’
The unfavourable summing-up of all arguments that have been put forth on the subject of woman’s higher education was in Andros Bartrand’s enunciation of the words.
‘Newnham and Girton send forth good men,’ remarked Geoffrey Arbuthnot. ‘In the future, sir, when the girls shall “make Greek Iambics, and the boys black-currant jams,” we look forward confidently to seeing Girton head of the river.’
‘At my age I am unmoved by new theories,’ said old Andros. ‘New facts I am not likely to confront. There has never yet been a great woman poet.’
‘Mrs. Browning, grandpapa.’