"You resent it all, I suppose," he said. "Of course you do. It makes you angry, I've no doubt. It would have made me angry, I dare say, at your age, to hear an elderly scientist dissect a pretty young creature and take the bloom off her life for her. It's natural."
"I don't like to think of her as—as being anything but happy—and—and good," said Tredennis, with some secret resentment.
"She'll not be bad," said the professor, critically. "It isn't in her. She might be happy, perhaps—if one thing happened to her."
"What one thing?" asked Tredennis.
"If she married a fine fellow, whom she was deeply and passionately in love with—which happens to very few women."
In the shadow of his corner Tredennis felt the hot blood mount steadily to his forehead, and was glad of the dim light, for the professor was still regarding him fixedly, though as if in abstraction.
"She will be—likely to marry the man she loves, sir," he said, in a voice neither clear nor steady.
"Yes," said the professor; "unless she makes the mistake of merely marrying the man who loves her. She will meet him often enough. And, if he chances some day to be a fascinating fellow, her fate will be sealed. That goes along with the rest of her strengths and weaknesses."
And he gave the fire a vigorous poke, which cast a glow of light upon them both; then, leaving his chair, he stood for a moment polishing his glasses,—staring absently at Tredennis before he put them on,—and wandered back to his table and his specimens.
Tredennis' own acquaintance with his young relative was not a very intimate one. Too many interests presented themselves on every side to allow of her devoting herself specially to any one, and her father's favorite scarcely took the form of an interest. She had not the leisure to discover that he was fully worth the discovering. She regarded him simply as a large and rather serious young man, who, without seeming stupid, listened rather than talked; and yet was not actually a brilliant listener, since he only listened with an air of observing quietly, and keeping the result of his observations to himself.