what our conversation was about, but I know she led me to believe I
might kiss her. Then when I attempted to do so she averted her
face.
"How COULD you?" she said; "I didn't mean that!"
That remained the state of our relations for two days. I developed
a growing irritation with and resentment against cousin Sybil,
combined with an intense desire to get that kiss for which I
hungered and thirsted. Cousin Sybil went about in the happy
persuasion that I was madly in love with her, and her game, so far
as she was concerned, was played and won. It wasn't until I had
fretted for two days that I realised that I was being used for the
commonest form of excitement possible to a commonplace girl; that
dozens perhaps of young men had played the part of Tantalus at
cousin Sybil's lips. I walked about my room at nights, damning her
and calling her by terms which on the whole she rather deserved,
while Sybil went to sleep pitying "poor old Dick!"
"Damn it!" I said, "I WILL be equal with you."
But I never did equalise the disadvantage, and perhaps it's as well,
for I fancy that sort of revenge cuts both people too much for a
rational man to seek it…
"Why are men so silly?" said cousin Sybil next morning, wriggling
back with down-bent head to release herself from what should have
been a compelling embrace.
"Confound it!" I said with a flash of clear vision. "You STARTED
this game."
"Oh!"
She stood back against a hedge of roses, a little flushed and
excited and interested, and ready for the delightful defensive if I
should renew my attack.
"Beastly hot for scuffling," I said, white with anger. "I don't
know whether I'm so keen on kissing you, Sybil, after all. I just
thought you wanted me to."
I could have whipped her, and my voice stung more than my words.
Our eyes met; a realhatred in hers leaping up to meet mine.
"Let's play tennis," I said, after a moment's pause.
"No," she answered shortly, "I'm going indoors."
"Very well."
And that ended the affair with Sybil.
I was still in the full glare of this disillusionment when Gertrude
awoke from some preoccupation to an interest in my existence. She
developed a disposition to touch my hand by accident, and let her
fingers rest in contact with it for a moment,-she had pleasant soft
hands;-she began to drift into summer houses with me, to let her
arm rest trustfully against mine, to ask questions about Cambridge.
They were much the same questions that Sybil had asked. But I
controlled myself and maintained a profile of intelligent and
entirely civil indifference to her blandishments.
What Gertrude made of it came out one evening in some talk-I forget
about what-with Sybil.
"Oh, Dick!" said Gertrude a little impatiently, "Dick's Pi."
And I never disillusioned her by any subsequent levity from this
theory of my innate and virginal piety.
6
It was against this harsh and crude Staffordshire background that I
think I must have seen Margaret for the first time. I say I think
because it is quite possible that we had passed each other in the
streets of Cambridge, no doubt with that affectation of mutual
disregard which was once customary between undergraduates and
Newnham girls. But if that was so I had noted nothing of the
slender graciousness that shone out so pleasingly against the
bleaker midland surroundings.
She was a younger schoolfellow of my cousins', and the step-daughter
of Seddon, a prominent solicitor of Burslem. She was not only not
in my cousins' generation but not in their set, she was one of a
small hardworking group who kept immaculate note-books, and did as
much as is humanly possible of that insensate pile of written work
that the Girls' Public School movement has inflicted upon school-
girls. She really learnt French and German admirably and
thoroughly, she got as far in mathematics as an unflinching industry
can carry any one with no great natural aptitude, and she went up to
Bennett Hall, Newnham, after the usual conflict with her family, to
work for the History Tripos.
There in her third year she made herself thoroughly ill through
overwork, so ill that she had to give up Newnham altogether and go
abroad with her stepmother. She made herself ill, as so many girls
do in those university colleges, through the badness of her home and
school training. She thought study must needs be a hard straining
of the mind. She worried her work, she gave herself no leisure to
see it as a whole, she feltherself not making headway and she cut
her games and exercise in order to increase her hours of toil, and
worked into the night. She carried a knack of laborious
thoroughness into the blind alleys and inessentials of her subject.