She smiled tenderly as she remembered how once at school she had opened Pepa’s Oxford Book of English Verse at the fly-leaf and found on it, in a “leggy,” unfledged hand, the following inscription: “To Josepha Lane, from her father,” and underneath, an extract from Cicero’s famous period in praise of letters—et haec studia adulescentiam alunt, senectutem oblectant, and so on. (That term Pepa’s form had been reading the Pro Archia.)
Teresa had gone to her and asked her what it meant.
“Dad would never have written that—besides, it’s in your writing.”
Pepa had blushed, and then laughed, and said, “Well, you see I wanted Ursula Noble” (Ursula Noble’s father was a celebrated Hellenist) “to think that we had a brainy father too!”
Then, how bustling and important she had been when, shorty after her début, she had become engaged to Harry Sinclair—a brilliant Trinity Don, much older than herself, and already an eminent Mendelian—how quickly and superficially she had taken over all his views—liberalism, atheism, eugenics!
Oh, yes, there had been much that had been irritating in Pepa; but, though Teresa had recognised it mentally, she had never felt it in her nerves.
She was suddenly seized with a craving for Pepa’s presence—dear, innocent, complacent Pepa, so lovely, so loving, with her fantastic, yet, somehow or other, cheering plans for one’s pleasure or well-being—plans that she galvanised with her own generous vitality.
Yes, Pepa had certainly been very happy during her six or seven years of married life at Cambridge: cultured undergraduates pouring into tea on Sundays, and Pepa taking them as seriously as they took themselves, laughing delightedly at the latest epigram that was going the round of Trinity and Kings’—“Dogs are sentimental,” or “Shaw is so Edwardian”—trolling Spanish Ladies or the Morning Dew in chorus round the piano; footing it on the lawn—undergraduates, Newnham students, Cambridge matrons, young dons, eyeglasses and prominent teeth glittering in the sun, either a slightly patronising smile glued on the face, or an expression of strenuous endeavour—to the favourite melodies of Charles II.; suffrage meetings without end, lectures on English literature, practising glees in the Choral Society; busy making cardboard armour for the Greek play, or bicycling off to Grantchester, or taking Anna to her dancing class, or off to Boots to change her novels—a Galsworthy for herself, a Phillips Oppenheim for Harry.
It had always seemed to Teresa that this life, in spite of its suffrage and girl’s clubs and “culture,” was both callous and frivolous in comparison with the tremendous adventures that were going on, all round, in laboratories and studies and College rooms: at any moment Professor —— might be able to resolve an atom, and blow up the whole of Cambridge in the process; and, in little plots of ground, flowers whose habitat was Peru or the Himalayas, were springing up with—say, purple pollen instead of golden, and that meant that a new species had been born; or else, Mr. —— of Christ’s, or John’s, or Caius, would suddenly feel the blood rush to his head as a blinding light was thrown on the verbal nouns of classical Arabic by a French article he had just been reading on the use of diminutives in the harems of Morocco.
Anyhow, whether callous or frivolous or both, it had given Pepa seven happy years.