"Better? I'm all right. Never been ill."
"You look very tired," remarked Muriel.
They gave her tea, the vicar absent-mindedly poking the fire with his boot. Now that he had handed over the problem of Muriel to Delia, he felt that he had done his duty, and might return to the congenial contemplation of mediæval taxes.
When tea was over he murmured some vague excuse about preparing a sermon and vanished hurriedly.
"Doesn't Mr. Vaughan want to prepare his sermons here?" asked Muriel.
"Not he. He hasn't gone to prepare a sermon either. If we went into the garden we should probably find him wandering up and down among the daffodils swearing softly over Pollard's Evolution of Parliament, which he calls a brilliant book, but most wrong-headed. Isn't it extraordinary that historians always seem quite pleased to find each other brilliant, but simply can't admit that they are anything but wrong-headed?"
"Do they? I don't know any historians. They don't live in Marshington—except your father, and of course we don't see much of him. I'm not surprised. We really aren't a very exciting lot of people." Again she laughed self-deprecatingly. "You know, you are very lucky, being so clever and going to Newnham like that. It must be frightfully nice——"
Delia lit another cigarette thoughtfully. "Smoke? No? You don't, do you?" Muriel shook her head. "You don't mind if I do, do you? I've got into rather a bad habit of doing it too much lately. You know, I've often wondered why you didn't go to college."
"I—oh, I—well, really as a matter of fact I did once think that I should like to. But I wasn't particularly clever you know."
"The last thing that one requires to make good use of a college education is brilliance. You want intelligence and industry and a sound constitution. The brilliant people can manage without it."