Tims pushed her silk turban still higher up on her forehead.
"I can always humbug Miss Walker and make her say lots of indiscreet things," Tims returned, with labored diplomacy. "But I don't repeat them—at least, not invariably."
There was a further argument on the point, which ended by Milly shedding tears and imploring to be told the worst.
Tims yielded.
"Stewart said your scholarship was A 1, but he was afraid you wouldn't get your First in Greats. He said you had a lot of difficulty in expressing yourself and didn't seem to get the lead of their philosophy and stuff—and—and generally wanted cleverness."
"He said that?" asked Milly, in a low, sombre voice, speaking as though to herself. "Well, I suppose it's better for me to know—not to go on hoping, and hoping, and hoping. It means less misery in the end, no doubt."
There was such a depth of despair in her face and voice that Tims was appalled at the consequence of her own revelation. She paced the room in agitation, alternately uttering incoherent abuse of her friend's folly and suggesting that she should at once abandon the ungrateful School of Literæ Humaniores and devote herself like Tims, to the joys of experimental chemistry and the pleasures of practical anatomy.
Meantime, Milly sat silent, one hand supporting her chin, the other playing with a pencil.
At length Tims, taking hold of Milly under the arms, advised her to "go to bed and sleep it off."
Milly rose dully and sat on the edge of her bed, while Tims awkwardly removed the hair-pins which Mrs. Shaw had so deftly put in. But as she was laying them on the little dressing-table, Milly suddenly flung herself down on the bed and lay there a twisted heap of blue flannel, her face buried in the pillows, her whole body shaken by a paroxysm of sobs. Tims supposed that this might be a good thing for Milly; but for herself it created an awkward situation. Her soothing remarks fell flat, while to go away and leave her friend in this condition would seem brutal. She sat down to "wait till the clouds rolled by," as she phrased it. But twenty minutes passed and still the clouds did not roll by.