"Oh, not absolutely that. They recognise my right to do what I want, but they think I'm a fool, all the same. They don't quarrel with me. They just go on wishing I was like my elder brother."
"What is he?"
"He works in my father's office in town. My father, you know—" he became suddenly confidential in tone—"is a rather typical sort of business-man. Materialist outlook—wanted me to manage a soap-works. We never got on absolutely well together. When I told him I was going to get a mastership at a public school he thought I was mad."
"And what will he think when you tell him you are going to marry the Headmaster's daughter?"
He looked at her curiously, for the first time intent upon her personally, for something in the way she had uttered that last question set up in him the suspicion that she was laughing at him. A careful scrutiny of her features, however, revealed no confirmation: he looked away again, shrugged his shoulders, and said: "Probably he'll think I'm madder than ever."
She gave him a curious glance with uptilted lips which he could not properly interpret. "Anyway," she said, quietly, "I shouldn't tell him that Helen's a child."
"Why not?"
Clare gave him again that curious, uninterpretable glance. "Because she isn't, that's all."
He was recovering from his surprise and was about to say something when she interrupted him with, perhaps, the first touch of animation that had so far distinguished her side of the conversation. "I told you," she said, "on the first night of term that you didn't understand Helen. And still you don't. If you did, you'd know that she was a woman, not a child at all."
"I wish you'd explain a little—"