“You must not be angry,” said Bee, very humbly. “It is only an idea that has come into my head—there may be nothing at all in it—but don’t please shut me up as you do sometimes—hear me out. Charlie! there is Mr. Delaine.”
“Mister—what?” said Charlie, which indeed did not show a very complaisant frame of mind—but a curate in the country is of less importance in the horizon of the son of a house who is at Oxford than he is in that of the daughter at home.
“Mr. Delaine,” repeated Bee. “You don’t remember him, perhaps, at all. He is the curate. When he came first he was said to be a great scholar. He took a first class. You need not say, pooh! Everybody said so, and it is quite true.”
“A first in theology, I suppose,” said Charlie, disdainfully.
“No, not that—that’s not what people call a first. Mr. Burton, I have always heard, is a good scholar himself, and he said a first; of course you know better than I do what that means.”
“Well,” said Charlie, “and supposing for the sake of argument that he took a first—what then?”
“Why, Charlie dear! He is an Oxford man too; he must know all the things you want to know—difficult passages and all that. Don’t you think, perhaps——”
“Oh, a coach!” cried Charlie. Then he paused, and with withering satire, added “No doubt, for little boys—your curate might do very well, Bee.”
“He is not my curate,” said Bee, with indignation; “but I have always heard he was a great scholar. I thought that was what you wanted.”
“It is not to be expected,” said her brother, loftily, “that you should know what I want. It is not a coach that is everything. If that were all, there need be no such things as universities. What a man needs is the whole machinery, the ways of thinking, the arrangements, the very atmosphere.”