“He can’t be interested in Earl’s Court, and you’re such a kid. I can’t understand it.”
“Well, we talked about religion to-day,” Sylvia told her.
“Oh, that’s it, is it?” Mabel said, very knowingly. “He’s one of those fellows who ought to have been a clergyman, is he? I knew he reminded me of some one. He’s the walking image of the clergyman where we used to live in Clapham. But you be careful, Sylvia. It’s an old trick, that.”
“You’re quite wrong. He hates clergymen.”
“Oh,” Mabel exclaimed, taken aback for a moment, but quickly recovering herself. “Oh, well, people always pretend to hate what they can’t get. And I dare say he wanted to be a clergyman. But don’t let him try to convert you. It’s an old trick to get something for nothing. And I know, my dear.”
July passed away into August, and Sylvia, buried for so many hours in the airless Hall of a Thousand and One Marvels, was flagging visibly. Philip used to spend nearly every afternoon and evening in the inner room where she worked—so many, indeed, that Mr. Woolfe protested and told her he would really have to put her back into the outer hall, because good customers were being annoyed by her admirer’s glaring at them through his glasses.
Philip was very much worried by Sylvia’s wan looks, and urged her more insistently to leave her job, and let him provide for her. But having vowed to herself that never again would she put herself under an obligation to anybody, she would not hear of leaving the Exhibition.
One Sunday in the middle of August Philip took Sylvia to Oxford, of which he had often talked to her. She enjoyed the day very much and delighted him by the interest she took in all the colleges they visited; but he was very much worried, so he said, by the approach of age.
“You aren’t so very old,” Sylvia reassured him. “Old, but not very old.”
“Fifteen years older than you,” he sighed.