"Is it so long?… I shall never forget the first day you came with your mother. I can see you now, Mary, sitting beside my poor father with your hand on his chair…. And that evening when you played to us, and dear Mr. Roddy was there…."
She thought: "Why can't I be kind—always? Kindness matters more than anything. Some day she'll die and she'll never have said or thought one unkind thing in all her poor, dreadful little life…. Why didn't I go to tea with her on Wednesday?"
On Wednesday her mind had revolted against its destiny of hunger. She had hated Morfe. She had felt angry with her mother for making her live in it, for expecting her to be content, for thinking that Dorsy and Miss Louisa and Miss Kendal were enough. She had been angry with Aunt Lavvy for talking about her to Miss Kendal.
Yet if it weren't for Miss Kendal she wouldn't be going into Durlingham to see Professor Lee Ramsden.
Inconceivable that she should be taken by Miss Kendal to see Professor
Lee Ramsden. Yet this inconceivable thing appeared to be happening.
She tried to remember what she knew about him. He was Professor of
English literature at the University of London. He had edited Anthologies
and written Introductions. He had written a History of English
Literature from Chaucer to Tennyson and a monograph on Shelley.
She thought of his mind as a luminous, fiery crystal, shining.
Posters on the platform at Durlingham announced in red letters that Professor Lee Ramsden, M.A., F.R.S.L., would lecture in the Town Hall at 8 P.M. She heard Miss Kendal saying, "If it had been at three instead of eight we could have gone." She had a supreme sense of something about to happen.
Heavenly the long, steep-curved glass roof of the station, the iron arches and girders, the fanlights. Foreign and beautiful the black canal between the purplish rose-red walls, the white swans swaying on the black water, the red shaft of the clock-tower. It shot up high out of the Market-place, topped with the fantastically large, round, white eye of its clock.
She kept on looking up to the clock-tower. At four she would see him.