The Warden made no reply, he merely moved the lamp very slightly nearer to the writing pad in front of him.
He had a stored-up memory of pink cheeks, a pure curve of chin and neck, a dark curl by the ear; objects young and graceful and gradually absorbed by those narrow eyes and stored in the brain. He also had memories less pleasant of the slighting way in which once or twice his sister had spoken of "Belinda and Co.," meaning by that the mother of this pretty piece of pretty girlhood, and the girl herself.
"She tries hard to read because we expect her to," continued Lady Dashwood. "If she had her own way she would throw the books into the fire, as tiresome stodge."
The Warden was listening with an averted face and now he remarked—
"Did you come in, Lena, to tell me this?"
When the Warden was annoyed there was in his voice and in his manner a "something" which many people called "formidable." As Lady Dashwood stood looking down at him, there flashed into her mind a scene of long ago, where the Warden, then an undergraduate, had (for a joke at a party in his rooms) induced by suggestion a very small weak man with peaceful principles to insist on fighting the Stroke of the college Eight, a man over six feet and broad in proportion. She remembered how she had laughed, and yet how she made her brother promise not to exercise that power again. Probably he had completely forgotten the incident. Why! it was nearly eighteen years ago, nearly nineteen; and here was James Middleton no longer an undergraduate but the Warden! Lady Dashwood bent over him smiling and laid her solid motherly hand upon his head. "Oh, dear, how time passes!" she said. "Jim, you are such a sweet lamb. No, I didn't come to tell you that. I came to ask you if you were going to dine with us this evening?"
"Yes," said the Warden. "Why?" and he now looked round at his sister without a trace of irritability and smiled.
"Because Mrs. Jack Dashwood is coming here. I didn't mention it before. Well, the fact is she happens to have a few days' rest from her work in London. She is with some relative in Malvern and coming on here this afternoon."
"Mrs. Jack Dashwood!" repeated the Warden with evident indifference.
"Jack Dashwood's widow. You remember my John's nephew Jack? Poor Jack who was killed at Mons!"