As they walked back together silently up the High towards Durham, Gillespie turned with a sudden dart to his friend and broke their joint reverie.
'Is your sister engaged, Dick?' he asked with a somewhat nervous jerk.
'Why, no,' Dick-answered, taken aback--'at least, not that I ever heard of.'
'I should think she would be soon,' Gillespie retorted meaningly.
'Why so?' Dick inquired in an unsuspecting voice.
'Well, she's very pretty,' Gillespie answered; 'and very clever; and very distinguished-looking.
'She is pretty,' Dick admitted, unsuspecting as before. No man ever really remembers his own sisters are women. 'But, you see, she never meets any young men at Chiddingwick. There's nobody to make love to her.'
'So much the better!' Gillespie replied, and then relapsed into silence.
|During the rest of that broken term Dick did little work at history: he had lost heart for Oxford, and was occupied mainly in looking out for employment, scholastic or otherwise. Employment, however, wasn't so easy to get. It never is nowadays. And Dick's case was peculiar. A certain vague suspicion always attaches to a man who has left the University, or proposes to leave it, without taking his degree. Dick found this disqualification told heavily against him. Everybody at Durham, to be sure, quite understood that Plantagenet was only going down from stress of private circumstances, the father having left his family wholly unprovided for; but elsewhere people looked askance at an applicant for work who could but give his possession of a college Scholarship as his sole credential. The Dons, of course, were more anxious that Plantagenet should stop up, to do credit to the college--he was a safe First in History, and hot favourite for the Lothian--than that he should go away and get paying work elsewhere; and in the end poor Dick began almost to despair of finding any other employment to bring in prompt cash than the hateful one at Chidding-wick, which Maud had so determinedly set her face against.
Nor was it Maud only with whom he had now to contend in that matter of the Assembly Rooms. Mary, too, was against him. As soon as Maud returned to Chiddingwick, she had made it a duty to go straight to Mary and tell her how she felt about Dick's horrid proposal. Now, Mary, at the first blush of it, had been so full of admiration for Dick's heroic resolve--'for it _was_ heroic, you know, Maud,' she said simply, calling her future sister-in-law for the first time by her Christian name--that she forgot at the moment the bare possibility of trying to advise Dick otherwise. But now that Maud suggested the opposite point of view to her, she saw quite clearly that Maud was right; while she herself, less accustomed to facing the facts of life, had been carried away at first sight by a specious piece of unnecessary self-sacrifice. She admired Dick all the same for it, but she recognised none the less that the heroic course was not necessarily the wisest one.