“Yes, more than anybody.”
“Why, may I ask?”
“Oh, because he is so simple,” she answered readily. “I can never tangle him up in a problem. He lays it all out and sorts it into heaps, and then generally sums up by saying there is nothing in it. It is so restful. And then he tells me about phosphates and the habits of the teal. But it is only for the rest to my muddled head that I like it so much. It would never put me off my work.”
“Sure?” asked Emma, and she was obliged to accept the assurance when it was given a second time.
As they passed the Vachells’ house, which was not far from the Gainsboroughs’, Mrs. Vachell was just going in. “Come and have tea with me?” she suggested. Emma explained that they had had tea and that she had work to do at home, but Teresa accepted. She was inclined, like Alice in Wonderland, to taste and nibble whatever new thing came her way; she had never been inside the Vachells’ house, nor felt that she understood what lay behind the self-possession of the small, graceful lady whom it was said the Professor had found fanning herself by moonlight under an obelisk and brought home. Mrs. Vachell’s face was beautiful and full of character but the character was of the reversible kind, of which it is impossible to decide whether it is intended to be good or bad. Such faces seem not, like most faces, to alter gradually with their owner’s mind, but to hold always in themselves two distinct characters between which the soul has never chosen a habitation. At death, opinion is generally divided as to which character has been the true one, as in life it was never decided which it would prove to be. “Very like a curious death-mask my father was once given for his study,” Susie had described her on first acquaintance. “Dante, or somebody, I think it was, who wrote the ‘Inferno.’”
Teresa followed the small gliding figure into the hall and up the stairs, where photographs of Byzantine art and reproductions of drawings from Egyptian tombs were hung right up to the high window that lighted the stairs with a cold north light. The back yards and chimneys of young Millport mixed disagreeably in her mind with the impression of endless centuries of life that she gathered from the procession of antiquity on the walls. There is something alarming to youth in the idea of the early days of a very old person.
The drawing-room was more cheerful, but Mr. Vachell’s study, which his wife showed her as they passed, made her shiver again. There were objects of stone, of clay, of mildewed bronze; tiny domestic possessions, gifts of love, weapons, tokens of mourning for the dead, provision even for an eternity of wandering beyond the grave. Everywhere were glass cases to preserve the imperishable; the penetrating dust of a new city defiling them notwithstanding. If Teresa had seen Life and Death supping together in the silent room, pledging one another from the old vessels that stood upon the Professor’s table, she could not have felt more discomfort than she did.
“Do you like these things?” Mrs. Vachell asked her.
“Perhaps I might if I got to know them,” she admitted, “but they scare me rather.”
“Come into the drawing-room and have tea then.” Mrs. Vachell led the way into the next room and rang the bell. “It is only half-past five; you have lots of time to recover. What have you been doing?”