“Pray pardon me,” said Edgar, “I can’t help it. The idea of teaching you is too much for my gravity. Tell me who the other learned pundits are from whom Lady Mary Tottenham learns—”
“Lady Mary Tottenham would learn from any man who had anything to teach her,” she answered with momentary anger; then added with a short laugh, extorted from her against her will, “Mr. Earnshaw, you are very impertinent and unkind; why should you laugh at one’s endeavour to help one’s fellow-creatures to a little instruction, and one’s self—”
“Are you quarrelling?” said Mr. Tottenham, stalking in suddenly, with his glass in his eye. “What is the matter? Earnshaw, I want to interest you in a very pet scheme of mine. When my wife has done with you, let me have a hearing. I want him to drive in with me to Tottenham’s, Mary, and see what is doing there.”
“I hope Mr. Earnshaw will be kinder to you than he has been to me,” said Lady Mary; “at me he does nothing but laugh. He despises women, I suppose, like so many other men, and thinks us beneath the range of intellectual beings.”
“What a cruel judgment,” said Edgar, “because I am tickled beyond measure at the thought of having anything to teach you, and at the suggestion that you can improve your mind by attending lectures, and are undergoing mental discipline by means of mathematics and history—”
“Oh, then it is only that you think me too old,” said Lady Mary, with the not unagreeable amusement of a pretty woman who knows herself to be not old, and to look still younger and fresher than she feels; and they had an amiable laugh over this excellent joke, which entirely restored the friendly relations between them. Mr. Tottenham smiled reflectively with his glass in his eye, not looking into the matter. He was too seriously occupied with his own affairs to enter into any unnecessary merriment.
“Come along, Earnshaw,” he said, “I want you to come into Tottenham’s with me, and on the way I will tell you all about my scheme, which my wife takes a great interest in also. You will come to the next evening, Mary? It is always so much more successful when you are there.”
“Surely,” said Lady Mary with a vague smile, as she gathered up a bundle of papers which she had produced to show Edgar. She shook her head over them as she turned away. Her husband’s schemes she patronized with a gentle interest; but her own occupied her a great deal more warmly as was natural. “You have not given me half the consideration my plan deserves,” she said half pathetically, “but don’t think I mean to let you off on that account,” and with a friendly smile to both the gentlemen she went to her own concerns. The library had been the scene of the conversation, and Lady Mary now withdrew to her own special table, which was placed in front of a great bay-window overlooking the flower-garden. It was a very large room, and Mr. Tottenham’s table had a less favourable aspect, with nothing visible but dark shrubberies from the window behind him, to which he judiciously turned his back.
“Mary prefers to look out, and I to look in,” he said; “to be sure I have her to look at, which makes a difference.”
This huge room was the centre of their morning occupations, and the scene of many an amiable controversy. The two tables which belonged to the pair individually were both covered with papers, that of Lady Mary being the most orderly, but not the least crowded, while a third large table, in front of the fire, covered with books and newspapers, offered scope for any visitor who might chance to join them in their viewy and speculative seclusion. As a matter of fact, most people who came to Tottenham’s, gravitated sooner or later towards this room. It was the point of meeting in the morning, just as the palm-tree in the conservatory was the centre of interest in the afternoon.