“Americans are very kind to women,” she said. “I like their ways.”
He sniffed, as though offended by some noxious odour.
“You do, do you?” he retorted. “Well--I don’t.”
“How are you and Dad getting on with the book?” she asked. “Is there much more work to do?”
He drew his pipe from his mouth, and knocked its ashes out against the stump of a tree.
“A great deal,” he replied. “A _very_ great deal more! Our researches lead us deeper and deeper--into the most astonishing intricacies of language--indeed one can positively say that language makes history. Language creates dynasties and destroys them,--Language crowns kings and equally decapitates them--Language--”
The sonorous clanging of a bell sounded persistently at this moment.
“Dinner,” she said, in a matter-of-fact tone. “That is a language every one understands! I think dinner, or the lack of it, has made more dynasties than anything! Are you coming?”
“I follow you,” he said, moved by a sort of obstinacy which led him to avoid the courtesy of accompanying her. She thereupon sprang away from him into the house, where she took her seat at the dinner table opposite her father, a choleric old gentleman who had already begun guzzling the soup. He ‘never waited for anybody’ as he informed all whom it might concern; and when the Philosopher sauntered in, a few minutes late as he always did for every meal, to the mute disgust of the parlourmaid, there was very little soup left. At this the fair Sentimentalist was not ill-pleased. It was naughty, she said to herself, to be quite glad that there was so little soup for so learned a man--still, learned as he was, he made ugly noises when he ate soup, and it was just as well that there was not much to make a noise with. She found the dinner rather boresome on this particular evening,--the Philosopher and her father prosed and prosed along in the dreariest dry ruts of conversation, now and then telling each other what they considered “good” stories, old as the oldest inhabitant of the most ancient jest-book. The Philosopher, in his assertive superiority of intelligence, had an aggravating way of prefacing any special story of his own by the question “Are you listening?” and, if the response was not entirely submissive and satisfactory, he would sniff a whole nest of embryo influenzas up his nose and remark, cuttingly, “Then I’ll wait!” The wrathful wretchedness of the persons who thus held him sniffing and “waiting” can only be imagined by discerning students of human nature. And the Sentimentalist, a little less patient with his ways than usual, felt a great relief when she could escape from the dinner table to the solitude of her own quiet room. Once there, she leaned out from the open window and looked at the bright stars, sprinkling the sky like big dewdrops,--and wondered, a trifle sadly, how life was going to turn out for her. From early childhood she had devoted every wish, every thought, every hope to her father,--and he was getting very old, very gouty and very cross. Lately he had found a certain solace for his constant irritability in the study of philology and the society of the Philosopher who assumed the same bent of research,--and, to a certain extent, she was grateful for this distraction to his frequently self-torturing mind. But she was rather a lonely little person,--and when the Philosopher first appeared on her limited horizon, she had hailed his presence with an unreasoning joy, because she loved books, and understood that he loved them too. She pictured the delightful talks she would have with this gifted personage about the authors they both admired,--and she was certain he would have a splendid character--generous, noble, patient, kind--because--oh, well!--because he had studied so much, and knew so much, and because he was a Philosopher. So she had idealised him in her mind, and accepted him at the ideal valuation,--a condition of pure romantic sentimentalism which amused him because it is rare to find nowadays, and when found, is so easy to destroy. From the merely physical and absolutely sensual side of things he was disposed to make love to her. The tentative efforts he had put forth in that direction had moved her, first to wonder, then to the faintest, half-compassionate response. He was old, she thought--and he seemed to have no one who cared for him. And she was touched to find so learned a man expressing any liking for her even by a look,--though her own intellectual ability was higher than his, had she known it.