And, with this before her, Isabel set out on a determined campaign, having for its ultimate issue the hope of possible reconciliation—she could not put it more optimistically than that—before the end of the term came.
It was not at all a desire to do good that drove her—indeed, her flashing disputes with Mrs. Dormer, her skirmishes with the younger Miss Madder, were very far away from any evangelistic principles whatever—but rather some hint of future trouble that was hard to explain. She wished to prevent things happening, was the way that she herself would have put it; but that did not hinder her from feeling a natural anxiety that Miss Madder, Mrs. Dormer, and the rest should have some of their own shots back before the end of the term was reached.
II.
But she began her campaign with her own Archie, and found him difficult. Going down the hill by the village on one of those sharp, tightly drawn days with the horizon set like marble and nothing moving save the brittle leaves blowing like brown ghosts up and down, she tried to get him to see the difficulties as she saw them, She attacked him at first on the question of making peace with Mr. Perrin, and came up at once against a bristling host of obstinacies and traditions that her ignorance of public school and university laws had formerly hidden from her.
Perrin was a bounder, and young Traill's eyes were cold and hard as he summed it all up in this sentence. He would do anything in the world for Isabel, but she did n't probably altogether understand what a fellow felt—there were things a man couldn't do. She found that the laws of the Medes and Persians were nothing at all in comparison with the stone tables of public school custom: “The man was a bounder”—“There were things a fellow couldn't do.”
She had not expected him to go and beg for peace—she had not probably altogether wished him to; but the way that he looked at it all left her with a curious mixture of feelings: she felt that he was so immensely young, and therefore to be—most delightful of duties—looked after. Also she felt, for the first time, all the purpose and obstinacy of his nature, so that she foresaw that there would in the future between them be a great many tussles and battles.
But she was very much cleverer than he was, and dealt with him very gently, and then suddenly gave him a sharp, little moral rap, and then kissed him afterwards. She found, in fact, that this trouble with Mr. Perrin was worrying him dreadfully. He hid it as well as he could, and hid it on the whole very successfully; but Isabel dragged it all out and saw that he hated quarreling with anybody, and that he now dimly discovered that he was the center of a vulgar dispute and that people were taking sides about him—all this was horrible.
He also felt very strongly the injustice of it. “I never meant to knock the fellow down. I never knew I'd taken his beastly umbrella—all this fuss!”—which was, Isabel thought, so very like a man, because the thing was done and there was no more to be said about it. He thought a great deal about her in the matter and was very anxious to stand up for her; indeed, that was the only aspect of the affair that gave him any satisfaction—that they should be fighting shoulder to shoulder against the “low, bounding” world, and he declared, as he looked at her, that he loved her more and more every day.
But all of this did not touch on his relations with Perrin, and his eyes with regard to that gentleman could only look one way—he would not make advances.
The more Isabel felt his determination, the more, curiously enough, she felt Mr. Perrin's pathos. She had not yet arrived at the definite watching of him that was to come upon them all soon so curiously; but when she thought of him she thought of Archie's definition of him, and she realized, as she had not realized before, that that would be a great many other persons' definition of him also. Whatever he was—cross, irritable, violent, even wicked—he was, at any rate, lonely, and that was enough to make Isabel sorry, and more than sorry.