"Edmund and Edgar won't be back from Marlborough until the end of the month; but Edward is coming in a fortnight. He delighted us all by winning a scholarship at Trinity. He's so happy at Cambridge, dear boy; though I think everybody is happy at Cambridge, don't you?"
Jasmine agreed, though she really had no opinion on the subject.
"Well, come along," said her aunt, "and we'll go and find your uncle. Quite a walk," she added, "for his study is at the far end of the top storey. His library is downstairs, of course, but he found that it didn't suit him for work, and though it's rather inconvenient having to carry books backwards and forwards up and downstairs, we all realize how important it is that he should be quiet, and nobody minds fetching any book he wants."
This was said with so much meaning that Jasmine immediately visualized herself carrying books up and down the Deanery stairs day in day out through the whole of the summer.
"I told you about the difficulty he had with his typewriting, and how anxious he was that Ethelred should learn, but the dear boy's mind was so bent on mechanics that he was always taking the machine to pieces. Very cleverly, I'm bound to say. But of course it occupied a good deal of his time. So now he practises the piano again instead. People tell me he's very musical."
While Aunt Ellen was talking, they were walking up and down short irregular flights of stairs and along narrow corridors, the floors of which were billowy with age, until at last they came to a corridor at the head of which was a large placard marked SILENCE.
"The boys are not allowed along here," said their mother with a sigh, as if by not being allowed along here they were being deprived of the main pleasure of their existence.
"Uncle Arnold does not like us to knock," she explained when they came to the door at the end of the corridor, on which was another label DO NOT KNOCK. She opened the door, and Jasmine was aware of a long, low, sunny room under a groined ceiling, the gabled windows of which were shaded with lucent green. The floor was littered with docketed papers and heaped high with books from which cardboard slips protruded. From the fact that the windows looked out on the Close instead of on the garden, Jasmine divined that the Cathedral Close was considerably quieter than the Deanery garden. Seated at a large table at the far end of the room was her uncle, or rather what she supposed to be her uncle, for her first impression was that somebody had left a large ostrich egg on the table.
"Jasmine," her aunt announced.
The ostrich egg remained motionless; but the scratching of a pen and the slow regular movement of a very plump white hand across a double sheet of foolscap indicated that the room contained human life. At the end of a minute the egg lifted itself from the table, and Jasmine found herself confronted by a very bright pair of eyes and offered that very plump white hand. After meeting so many tall, gaunt relatives, it was a great pleasure to meet one who was actually shorter than herself. It was not merely that the Dean was shorter than herself which attracted her. He was regarding her with an expression that, had she not been assured of his entire attention's being concentrated upon Anglo-Saxon history, she would have supposed to be friendly, even affectionate; at any rate it was an unusually pleasant expression for a relative. It was probably that first impression of the Dean's head as an ostrich egg which led her to compare him to a bird; but the longer she looked at him—and she had to look quite a long time because her uncle said nothing at all—the more she thought he resembled a bird. His eyes were like a bird's, small, bright, hard, and round; he put his head on one side like a bird; and his thin legs, encased in gaiters beneath that distinct paunch, completed the resemblance.