"He has a good many enthusiasms, Richard," said the professor. "They might form a collection of themselves. He won't tire of life easily. He is a fine contrast to—the other."
They were nearing the house again by this time, and he glanced up at its front.
"There is a light in the nursery window," he said. "It must be one of Janey's restless nights."
"Yes," said Tredennis. "Mrs. Amory was with her when we came downstairs, and she told us that the child was nervous and needed her."
"She has wonderful patience with them," said the professor, "and a sort of genius for understanding their vague young needs and desires. She never does them an injustice for want of thought, and never fails them. I have seen her spend half an hour half-kneeling, half-sitting on the nursery floor, by one of them, with her arm round it, questioning it, and helping it to tell its own story, in a way that was very motherly. There is a great deal of the maternal instinct in her."
Tredennis made no reply, but there rose before his mental vision the picture before the nursery fire, and he saw again the soft, close clasp of the fair hand and arm.
"It's curious how seldom we speak of paternal instinct," the professor went on. "It is always maternal instinct. Well, it is a great thing. And it is a great safeguard where—where life is not satisfactory. And as one grows older one sees a good deal of that. It is pitiful sometimes, when one finds it, as one so often does, in young things who haven't got over their desperate mental insistence on their right to be happy."
He checked himself with a faint laugh.
"I'm prosing, my boy," he said. "I always do it when I take my saunter at night. It is a sort of safeguard against doing it in the day. And I find I am specially given to it when I talk of Bertha. It is the paternal instinct, if there is such a thing. You remember how we talked of her when she came home from school. Do you find her much changed?"
"She has changed from a girl—a child, almost—to a woman," said Tredennis.