Having, as usual, suited the action to the word, Cooper was shortly able to announce that the car was there, and that he would come back to the table and see if the blotting-paper was straight.
"They'll draw on it," he said mournfully. "They always do. That's a thing I couldn't do myself, even if I weren't taking down the Minutes. I couldn't pay attention if I were drawing."
They did draw on the blotting-paper.
Sir Julian, leaning back at the head of the table, giving only half his attention to the meeting, which followed lines so habitual as to have become almost routine, watched with idle amusement the verification of Cooper's resignedly doleful prophecies.
Old Alderman Bellew, oily and apoplectic, made meaningless circles and semi-circles with a pencil grasped between the swollen knuckles of his first and second fingers, and only glanced up once or twice as a question of finance was touched upon by Fuller, Financial Secretary to the College as well as Supervisor of Classes.
Another director was yawning almost unconcealedly, until, catching the eye of the chairman, he assumed an expression of acute concern and hastily inserted a forefinger into his still open mouth as though in search of an aching tooth. This simple manœuvre was apparent to Sir Julian, and his eyes half involuntarily met Mark Easter's laughing blue ones in an instant's exchange of silent amusement.
Julian looked down again at his own share of blotting-paper, left immaculate in deference to Cooper's feelings, and his thoughts dwelt upon Mark Easter.
He thought of the good-looking, light-hearted fellow that Mark had been all his life, of his casual marriage, embarked upon out of pure good-nature, with a woman older than himself, and for no better reasons than the ones that he had once put forward, half apologetically, to Julian himself.
"She was having such a rotten time when I met her in Ireland—no one ever asked her to dance, and the other girls all seemed to be younger and prettier and having more fun. I used to take her for drives, you know, and then dance with her in the evenings; and upon my word, I was the only chap that ever took any notice of her, I do believe. And I really did want to settle down and have a home, and it somehow seemed more likely she'd take me than one of the pretty little fly-aways who could get all the fun they wanted before settling down. She was by way of being a good housekeeper, too, and fond of kids. I'm fond of kids myself," said Mark Easter wistfully.
Sir Julian wondered, not for the first time, how long that fondness had survived the shrieking, stamping, bullying era inaugurated by Ruthie, and the whining, unwashed, question-asking proclivities of her junior.