“Really!” she cried, “Really! Am I really a help?”
Lewisham’s face and gesture, were all assent. She gave a little cry of delight, stood for a moment, and then by way of practical demonstration of her unflinching helpfulness, hurried round the table towards him with arms extended, “You dear!” she cried.
Lewisham, partially embraced, pushed his chair back with his disengaged arm, so that she might sit on his knee....
Who could doubt that she was a help?
CHAPTER XXV. — THE FIRST BATTLE.
Lewisham’s inquiries for evening teaching and private tuition were essentially provisional measures. His proposals for a more permanent establishment displayed a certain defect in his sense of proportion. That Melbourne professorship, for example, was beyond his merits, and there were aspects of things that would have affected the welcome of himself and his wife at Eton College. At the outset he was inclined to regard the South Kensington scholar as the intellectual salt of the earth, to overrate the abundance of “decent things” yielding from one hundred and fifty to three hundred a year, and to disregard the competition of such inferior enterprises as the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and the literate North. But the scholastic agents to whom he went on the following Saturday did much in a quiet way to disabuse his mind.
Mr. Blendershin’s chief assistant in the grimy little office in Oxford Street cleared up the matter so vigorously that Lewisham was angered. “Headmaster of an endowed school, perhaps!” said Mr. Blendershin’s chief assistant “Lord!—why not a bishopric? I say,”—as Mr. Blendershin entered smoking an assertive cigar—“one-and-twenty, no degree, no games, two years’ experience as junior—wants a headmastership of an endowed school!” He spoke so loudly that it was inevitable the selection of clients in the waiting-room should hear, and he pointed with his pen.
“Look here!” said Lewisham hotly; “if I knew the ways of the market I shouldn’t come to you.”