"Yes. She struck my memory—her work stood out."
"Of course she is clever," said Mrs. Pope. "Or we shouldn't have sent her to Oxbridge. There she's doing quite well—quite well. Everyone says so. I don't know, of course, if Mr. Magnet will let her finish there."
"Mr. Magnet?"
"She's just engaged to him. Of course she's frightfully excited about it, and naturally he wants her to come away and marry. There's very little excuse for a long engagement. No."
Her voice died in a musical little note, and she seemed to be scrutinizing the tennis with an absorbed interest. "They've got new balls," she said, as if to herself.
Trafford had rolled over, and she fancied she detected a change in his voice when it came. "Isn't it rather a waste not to finish a university career?" he said.
"Oh, it wouldn't be wasted. Of course a girl like that will be hand and glove with her husband. She'll be able to help him with the scientific side of his jokes and all that. I sometimes wish it had been Daffy who had gone to college though. I sometimes think we've sacrificed Daffy a little. She's not the bright quickness of Marjorie, but there's something quietly solid about her mind—something stable. Perhaps I didn't want her to go away from me.... Mr. Magnet is doing wonders at the net. He's just begun to play—to please Marjorie. Don't you think he's a dreadfully amusing man, Mr. Trafford? He says such quiet things."
§ 9
The effect of this éclaircissement upon Mr. Trafford was not what it should have been. Properly he ought to have realized at once that Marjorie was for ever beyond his aspirations, and if he found it too difficult to regard her with equanimity, then he ought to have shunned her presence. But instead, after his first shock of incredulous astonishment, his spirit rose in a rebellion against arranged facts that was as un-English as it was ungentlemanly. He went back to Solomonson with a mood of thoughtful depression giving place to a growing passion of indignation. He presented it to himself in a generalized and altruistic form. "What the deuce is the good of all this talk of Eugenics," he asked himself aloud, "if they are going to hand over that shining girl to that beastly little area sneak?"
He called Mr. Magnet a "beastly little area sneak!"