‘If Miss Bartrand be a hater of men, a scorner of marriage, so much the easier prospect for me,’ said Geoffrey. ‘At the present time I look upon myself as an educational machine to be hired out at so much an hour. I have no more mind to put on company manners for Miss Marjorie Bartrand than for any thick-headed fresher I was vainly endeavouring to get through Little Go.’
‘You? It depends, rather, on what Miss Marjorie Bartrand has a mind for,’ observed Gaston Arbuthnot, with the certainty born of larger experience.
‘Happily, the wording of the advertisement shows that Miss Bartrand means work. We have it here.’
Geoffrey looked down the columns of a small, blue, badly-printed local newspaper, half French, half English, that lay open on the breakfast table.
“Tutor wanted. I, Marjorie Bartrand of Tintajeux, need a coach to prepare me for Girton. Classics and mathematics. Six hours a week.—Apply, personally, at Tintajeux Manoir, after six P.M. An Oxford or Cambridge man preferred.”’
‘Does any one know if Marjorie Bartrand is handsome?’ exclaimed Gaston, with sudden animation. ‘Dinah, I adjure you to find out the truth in this matter. The women of the hotel would at least repeat the popular island beliefs. “An Oxford or Cambridge man preferred.” The crystalline artfulness of the clause touches one, from a girl who makes pretence at misanthropy.’
‘But surely, Gaston, you would not——’
‘I would do most things. My classics were unfairly judged of by my college tutor. My mathematics,’ Gaston confessed, with his air of unreliable fatuity, ‘never existed. Still, I kept all my terms, except, of course, the hunting terms. And I succeeded—as far as I went! If I passed no exams., I was at least never spun. I am as much a Cambridge man as Geoffrey is. I feel more than disposed to apply to Miss Marjorie Bartrand myself.’
The muscles about Dinah Arbuthnot’s delicately-carved mouth trembled.