"No, thank you."
Miss Gurney went out, and Henrietta sat at her paper for two hours and a half. It was so bad, so unintelligible, that she actually cried over it, and when she heard Miss Gurney's step, she carried it off to her bedroom and locked the door. Miss Gurney was after her in an instant.
"How are you getting on with your paper, dear? Can I be of any help?"
She did finish it at last, and gave it to Mr. Amery. She knew it was bad, but she was too ignorant to know quite how bad. Professor Amery, with the extreme courtesy of elderly gentlemen, wrote: "I think there are one or two points which I have not made quite clear. Would you care to talk them over with me after the class?" But this offer was so alarming that Henrietta "cut" her lectures for two weeks.
There would have been more chance for her, if only she could have become in the least interested. She tried the French Revolution next term for a change, but liked it no better than Aristotle. Intellectual life was dead and buried in her long ago. What would have really suited her best in the present circumstances would have been shorthand and type-writing, but at that time no such occupation was open to her.
She would perhaps have jogged on indefinitely at the lectures, if Miss Gurney, whose great interest was novelty and change, and whose abstracts of learned books had lately become much less voluminous, had not jumped at a suggestion to take a delicate niece abroad, and proposed that Henrietta should come too. So Henrietta consented, and with little regret they gave up the lodgings, and said good-bye to learning.
CHAPTER IX
Henrietta paid her father a visit before they started abroad. The promise of the first days was amply fulfilled; the whole house was happy, and Henrietta was touched by the warmth of her welcome. After the squalor of lodgings home was pleasant, and her father's invitation was cordial: "Henrietta, why don't you stay with us? Mildred," with a fond look at his wife, "never will allow your room to be used; it's always ready waiting for you."
It was a temptation to Henrietta, but she refused partly from pride, from a feeling that she ought not to disturb the present comfort, but also because it was getting a principle with her, as apparently with many middle-aged Englishwoman, that she must always be going abroad. Yet she knew that Miss Gurney did not particularly want to have her, and had invited her more from laziness than from anything else.