"How?" said she. "What shall I learn?"
"If you learn that I am a grisly Egoist?"
"You? And it would not be egoism," added Laetitia, revealing to him at the same instant as to herself that she swung suspended on a scarce credible guess.
"—Will nothing pierce your ears, Mr. Whitford?"
He heard the intruding voice, but he was bent on rubbing out the cloudy letters Laetitia had begun to spell, and he stammered, in a tone of matter-of-fact: "Just that and no better"; then turned to Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson.
"—Or are you resolved you will never see Professor Crooklyn when you look on him?" said the great lady.
Vernon bowed to the Professor and apologized to him shufflingly and rapidly, incoherently, and with a red face; which induced Mrs. Mountstuart to scan Laetitia's.
After lecturing Vernon for his abandonment of her yesterday evening, and flouting his protestations, she returned to the business of the day. "We walked from the lodge-gates to see the park and prepare ourselves for Dr. Middleton. We parted last night in the middle of a controversy and are rageing to resume it. Where is our redoubtable antagonist?"
Mrs. Mountstuart wheeled Professor Crooklyn round to accompany Vernon.
"We," she said, "are for modern English scholarship, opposed to the champion of German."