"I am sure they will be delighted, and it will make a nice beginning for Miss Marchrose on her first Sunday."
Sir Julian walked away even gloomier than before at the recollection that his wife's hospitality would not improbably be extended to the perpetrator of the outrage which had driven Captain Clarence Isbister to such extreme demonstrations of despair.
"Do you happen to remember—did you notice—what that woman's Christian name was?" he enquired of Mark Easter.
"The new Superintendent?"
"Yes."
"Let me see. I saw her letter to Fuller—something unusual.... Was it Pauline?"
"I thought so," said Sir Julian.
It was characteristic both of Sir Julian's dislike to anything which came, in his opinion, under the extremely elastic heading of officiousness, and of the care with which he had impressed his dislike upon Mark Easter, that his companion did not ask him why he thus dejectedly took for granted the name bestowed at baptism upon Miss Marchrose. Mark Easter, talkative and open-hearted, was yet the only man from whom Sir Julian said that he had never received an officious enquiry or an unasked offer of assistance.
If the remark might be looked upon as a form of the highest commendation, it was one which Sir Julian had never yet shown any disposition to make in regard to his wife.
Nothing had as yet persuaded Edna Rossiter of the inadvisability of addressing personalities to a man whose surface cynicism was used to cloak extreme sensitiveness, and whose bitterness of speech was the outcome of such disillusionment of spirit as comes only to those capable of an idealism as delicate as it is reserved.