“I'm glad you like it,” she said. “I like it, too.” Then, with a sudden feeling of friendship, an odd sense of intimacy, a quick impulse of common femininity, she added:
“I've had some good times in this dress. Wearing it up here makes me remember them very strangely. It's queer, what a difference it makes—” She stopped and looked questioningly at the older woman.
But the German assistant smiled at her. “Yes,” she said, “it is. And when you have been teaching seven years the difference becomes very apparent.” She gathered up her books, still smiling in a reminiscent way. And as she went out of the door, she looked back at the glaring, sunny room as if already it were far behind her, as if already she felt the house-mother's kiss, and heard the 'cello, and saw Klara's tiny daughter standing by the door, throwing kisses, calling, “Da ist sie, ja!”
Lost in the dream, her eyes fixed absently, she stumbled against her fellow-assistant, who was making for the room she had just left.
“I beg your pardon—I wasn't looking. Oh, it's you!” she murmured vaguely. Her fellow-assistant had a headache, and forty-five written papers to correct. She had just heard, too, a cutting criticism of her work made by the self-appointed faculty critic; the criticism was cleverly worded, and had just enough truth to fly quickly and hurt her with the head of her department. So she was not in the best of tempers.
“Yes, it's I,” she said crossly. “If you had knocked these papers an inch farther, I should have invited you to correct them. If you go about in that abstracted way much longer, my dear, Miss Selbourne will inform the world (on the very best authority) that you're in love.”
“I? What nonsense!”
It was a ridiculous thing to say, and she flushed angrily at herself. It was only a joke, of course.
The other woman laughed shortly.
“Dear me! I really believe you are!” she exclaimed. “The girls were saying at breakfast that Professor Tredick was ruining himself in violets yesterday—so it was for you!” and she went into the lecture-room.