She seemed always to laugh at him. Her visible merriment at his question dashed his spirits for an instant. Then he saw how genial and honest was her mirth, and smiled himself in spontaneous sympathy with it.
“Don’t dream of suggesting it to him!” she adjured the young man, with mock solemnity. “He has a horror of the idea of killing living creatures. He does not even fish for sport—though I confess I hardly follow him to that length. And don’t speak of him in that roundabout way, but call him Emanuel, and call me Kathleen or Kit—whichever comes easiest. Merely because Thom’s directory swears we’re forty years old, we’re not to be made venerable people by you. All happy folk belong to the same generation, no matter when they were born—and—but here is Emanuel now.
“I have been telling Christian,” she continued, addressing her husband as he paused at the foot of the steps, “that he is to be happy here, even in spite of himself.”
Emanuel shook hands with his cousin, and nodded pleased approval of his wife’s remark. His smile, however, was of a fleeting sort. “Nothing has come of the Onothera experiments,” he announced to her in a serious tone. “I’m afraid we must give up the idea of the yellow fuchsia.”
CHAPTER IX
Emanuel Torr, at the age of forty, was felt by those who knew and loved him almost to have justified the very highest of the high hopes which his youth had encouraged. This intimate circle of appreciation was rendered a small one by the circumstances of his temperament and choice of career; but beyond this his name was familiar to many who had never seen him, or who remembered him at best as a stripling, yet who habitually thought and spoke of him as an example and model to his generation.
At Oxford, twenty years before, he had attracted attention of a sort rather peculiar to himself. Those who took note of him saw foreshadowed the promise, not so much of great achievements as of the development and consolidation of a great influence. He was not specially distinguished in his work at the University, and he made no mark at the Union, where there happened at the time to be glittering a quite exceptional galaxy of future front bench men, judges and bishops. In Emanuel’s case, the interest he aroused was perhaps more sentimental than intellectual. His mind was seen to be of a fine order, but his character was even more attractive to the observant eye. The facts that he was half Jewish in blood, and that in time he would be the possessor of enormous wealth, no doubt lent an added suggestion of romance to the picture of delicate, somewhat coldly modeled features, of ivory skin and serious, musing dark eyes, and of a rare smile of wonderful sweetness, which Oxford men of the mid-seventies still associate with his name. It was in the days when Disraeli’s remarkable individuality was a part of England’s current history, and when the English imagination, in part from the stimulus of this fact, dwelt upon the possibilities of a new Semitic wave of inspiration and ethical impetus. The dreams, the aspirations, the mysterious “perhaps” of Daniel Deronda were in men’s minds, and Johannesburg had not been so much as heard of.
What the University recognized in the youth standing upon the threshold of manhood, had been an article of faith within his home since his childhood. It is as well to recount at this place the brief story of that home.