She kissed his hand. "I shall long for you to come back," she said, and then ran out, leaving him alone to return to his desk with a heart sick and empty.
"There can be no cohesion, no progress in the world, no hope for the future of man, if men break their word; if there is no such thing as inviolable honour," the Warden said to himself, just as he had said before. "After all, as long as honour is left, one has a right to live, to struggle on, to endure."
CHAPTER XX
SHOPPING
Mrs. Potten found that it "paid" to do her own shopping, and she did it once every week, on Friday. For this purpose she was compelled to use her car. This grieved her. Her extreme desire to save petrol would have been more patriotic if she had not availed herself, on every possible occasion, of using other people's petrol, or, so to speak, other people's oats.
She had gone to the Sale of work in Boreham's gig, but there was not much room in it for miscellaneous parcels, so she was obliged to come into Oxford on the following morning as usual and do her regular shopping.
Mrs. Potten's acquaintance with the University consisted in knowing a member of it here and there, and in accepting invitations to any public function which did not involve the expenditure of her own money. No Greenleafe Potten had ever given any endowment to Oxford, nor, for the matter of that, had any Squire of Chartcote ever spent a penny for the advancement of learning. Indeed, the old County had been mostly occupied in preserving itself from gradual extinction, and the new County, the Nouveaux Riches, had been mainly occupied in the dissipation of energy.
But Mrs. Potten had given the Potten revenues a new lease of life. Not only did she make a point of not reducing her capital, but she was increasing it year by year. She did this by systematic and often minute economies (which is the true secret of economy). The surface of her nature was emotional, enclosing a core of flint, so that when she (being short-sighted) dropped things about in moments of excitement, agreeable or disagreeable, she made such losses good by drawing in the household belt. If she inadvertently dropped a half-crown piece down a grating while exchanging controversial remarks with a local tradesman, or mixed up a note with her pocket handkerchief and mislaid both when forced to find a subscription to some pious object, or if she left a purse containing one shilling and fivepence behind her on a chair in the agitation of meeting a man whom she admired (a man like the Warden, for instance); when such misfortunes happened she made them up—somehow!