'Wait until you are asked, puss.'
'Ah, as to that,' returned the young philosopher, calmly, 'as Dr. John says, it takes all sorts of people to make up a world, and I daresay some one will be found who does not object to eye-glasses.'
'Or to blue stockings,' observed Mildred, rather slyly.
'You forget we live in enlightened days,' remarked Chriss, sententiously; 'this sort of ideas belonged to the Dark Ages. Minds are not buried alive now because they happen to be born in the feminine gender,' continued Chriss, with a slight confusion of metaphor.
Mildred smiled. Chriss's odd talk distracted her from sad thoughts. The winding path had already hidden the lovers from her; unconsciously she slackened her pace.
'I should not mind a nice gray professor, perhaps, if he knew lots of languages, and didn't take snuff. But they all do; it clears the brain, and is a salutary irritant,' went on Chriss, who had only seen one professor in her life, and that one a very dingy specimen. 'I should like my professor to be old and sensible, and not young and silly, and he must not care about eating and drinking, or expect me to sew on his buttons, or mend his gloves. Some one ought to invent a mending-machine. I am sure these things take away half the pleasure of living.'
'My little Chriss, do you mean to be head without hands? You will be a very imperfect woman, I am afraid, and I hope in that case you will not find your professor.'
'I would rather be without him, after all,' replied Chriss, discontentedly. 'Men are so stupid; they want their own way, and every one has to give in to them. I would rather live in lodgings like Roy, somewhere near the British Museum, where I could go and read every day, and in the evening I would go to lectures and concerts, or stop at home and play with Fritter-my-wig: that is just the sort of life I should like, Aunt Milly.'
'What is to become of your father and me? Perhaps Olive may marry.'
'Olive? not a bit of it. She always says nothing would induce her to leave papa. You don't want me to stop all my life in this little corner of the world, where everything is behind the times, and there is not a creature to whom one cares to speak?'