"It ought, you know," Tietjens said with soft dangerousness, "to be 'Kisses mingled with sad tears' . . . 'Tristibus et lacrimis oscula mixta dabis. . . .'"
"I'm hanged if I ever could," she exclaimed explosively. "A man like you could die in a ditch and I'd never come near. You're desiccated even for a man who has learned his Latin from the Germans."
"Oh, well, I'm a mathematician," Tietjens said. "Classics is not my line!"
"It isn't," she answered tartly.
A long time afterwards from her black figure came the words:
"You used 'mingled' instead of 'mixed' to translate mixta. I shouldn't think you took English at Cambridge, either! Though they're as rotten at that as at everything else, father used to say."
"Your father was Balliol, of course," Tietjens said with the snuffy contempt of a scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge. But having lived most of her life amongst Balliol people she took this as a compliment and an olive branch.
Some time afterwards Tietjens, observing that her silhouette was still between him and the moon, remarked:
"I don't know if you know that for some minutes we've been running nearly due west. We ought to be going south-east by a bit south. I suppose you do know this road. . . ."
"Every inch of it," she said, "I've been on it over and over again on my motor-bicycle with mother in the side-car. The next cross road is called Grandfather's Wantways. We've got eleven miles and a quarter still to do. The road turns back here because of the old Sussex iron pits; it goes in and out amongst them; hundreds of them. You know the exports of the town of Rye in the eighteenth century were hops, cannon, kettles and chimney backs. The railings round St. Paul's are made of Sussex iron."