She surprised him a little, but even this sudden weakness seemed adorable.
"You don't think that I'm shirking——?" she asked, a little too eagerly.
"You know your father best," he answered. "I'll tell you all he says and all the terror of him here to-morrow afternoon."
§ 7
In the stillness of the night Trafford found himself thinking over Marjorie; it was a new form of mental exercise, which was destined to play a large part in his existence for many subsequent years. There had come a shadow on his confidence in her. She was a glorious person; she had a kind of fire behind her and in her—shining through her, like the lights in a fire-opal, but——He wished she had not made him promise to conceal their meeting and their close co-operation from her father. Why did she do that? It would spoil his case with her father, and it could forward things for them in no conceivable way. And from that, in some manner too subtle to trace, he found his mind wandering to another problem, which was destined to reappear with a slowly dwindling importance very often in this procedure of thinking over Marjorie in the small hours. It was the riddle—it never came to him in the daytime, but only in those intercalary and detachedly critical periods of thought—why exactly had she engaged herself to Magnet? Why had she? He couldn't imagine himself, in Marjorie's position, doing anything of the sort. Marjorie had ways of her own; she was different.... Well, anyhow, she was splendid and loving and full of courage.... He had got no further than this when at last he fell asleep.
§ 8
Trafford's little attempt to regularise his position was as creditable to him as it was inevitably futile. He sought out 29, Hartstone Square in the morning on his way to his laboratory, and he found it one of a great row of stucco houses each with a portico and a dining-room window on the ground floor, and each with a railed area from which troglodytic servants peeped. Collectively the terrace might claim a certain ugly dignity of restraint, there was none of your Queen Anne nonsense of art or beauty about it, and the narrow height, the subterranean kitchens of each constituent house, told of a steep relentless staircase and the days before the pampering of the lower classes began. The houses formed a square, as if the British square so famous at Waterloo for its dogged resistance to all the forces of the universe had immortalized itself in buildings, and they stared upon a severely railed garden of hardy shrubs and gravel to which the tenants had the inestimable privilege of access. They did not use it much, that was their affair, but at any rate they had keys and a nice sense of rights assured, and at least it kept other people out.
Trafford turned out of a busy high road full of the mixed exhilarating traffic of our time, and came along a quiet street into this place, and it seemed to him he had come into a corner of defence and retreat, into an atmosphere of obstinate and unteachable resistances. But this illusion of conservativism in its last ditch was dispelled altogether in Mr. Pope's portico. Youth flashed out of these solemnities like a dart shot from a cave. Trafford was raising his hand to the solid brass knocker when abruptly it was snatched from his fingers, the door was flung open and a small boy with a number of dirty books in a strap flew out and hit him with projectile violence.
"Blow!" said the young gentleman recoiling, and Trafford recovering said: "Hullo, Theodore!"