Eve did not enjoy that call; she enjoyed nothing in those days but prayer and despair; but she got to the end of it without any more tears and crashes. And she said to her mother afterward that young Williams seemed a nice boy—but so dull. Well, they were quits. She had seemed dull enough to Fitz. A sick cat may touch your heart, but does not furnish you with lively companionship. Fitz was heartily glad when the Burtons had gone. He had worked very hard to make things possible for that absurd baby camel.
"You may call her an absurd baby camel," said his mother, "but it's my opinion that she is going to be a very great beauty."
"She!" exclaimed Fitz, thinking that the ugliness of Eve might have unhinged his mother's beauty-loving mind.
"Oh," said his mother, "she's at an age now—poor child! But don't you remember how the bones of her face—"
"I am trying to forget," said Fitz with a tremendous shudder for the occasion.
IV
Fitz did not take a degree at Oxford. He left in the middle of his last term, leaving many friends behind. He stood well, and had been in no especial difficulty of mischief, and why he left was a mystery. The truth of the matter is that he had been planning for ten years to leave Oxford in the very middle of his last term. For upon that date fell his twenty-first birthday, when he was to be his own man. He spent a few hours in his mother's house in London. And, of course, she tried to make him go back and finish, and was very much upset, for her. But Fitz was obdurate.
"If it were Yale, or Princeton, or Harvard, or Berkeley, or Squedunk," he said, "I would stick it out. But a degree from Oxford isn't worth six weeks of home."
"But aren't you going to wait till I can go with you?"
"If you'll go with me to-night you shall have my state-room, and I'll sleep on the coal. But if you can't go till to-morrow, mother mine, I will not wait. I have cabled my father," said he, "to meet me at quarantine."