"I shall take nothing for granted. But you see, Julian, I can't take life quite as you do—quite as callously, as cynically. There is a big responsibility for those of us who see a little—ah, such a very little way it is—further into the heart of things. We can only hope, and give, and spend ourselves—and judge no man."
Julian, who disliked being touched, moved his arm out of reach, and replied to these humanitarian sentiments unsympathetically.
"Your remarks have not the slightest bearing upon the case, Edna."
He thought to himself bitterly, not for the first time, that a stronger man would reject the weapons of obvious, meaningless satire, but nervous irritability again and again drove him to seek an outlet in words that he despised.
In silence, he entered the College with Edna, and let her proceed to the Supervisor's room, aware that he had purposely timed their arrival for an hour when Fairfax Fuller would be engaged in one of the classrooms. Few things discomposed Mr. Fuller more than a feminine intrusion which could not be accounted for by a question of business.
"He will be disappointed," seriously said Edna, turning away from the empty room. "But we shall have other talks. I don't despair yet of getting Fuller to Culmhayes, for all his misogyny." It was a principle with Lady Rossiter, her husband knew, never to allow their differences to degenerate into an offended silence when they were alone.
He sometimes thought that he could have borne it all better had she been a woman to make scenes, and to oppose him with tears or temper, instead of with that considered, brightly-unconscious, eternal loving-kindness.
They found Miss Marchrose in her own room, at work on the typewriter. She wore a long blue pinafore, and Julian noticed with an odd satisfaction that this was one of the days when her variable face showed colour and unmistakable beauty.
"Good afternoon," said Julian. "I hope we are not too early. My wife—Miss Marchrose."
Lady Rossiter, shaking hands, revealed her rather large white teeth in a smile, but Miss Marchrose, after her fashion, remained calmly serious.