The Family
“The Oriental peoples didn’t have an Age of
Chivalry. They didn’t need one,” Lillian observed. “And this reserve—it becomes in itself
ostentatious, a vain-glorious vanity.”
“Oh, my dear, all is vanity! I don’t dispute that. Now I must really go, and I wish I could play the game as well as you do. I have no enthusiasm for being a father-in-law. It’s you who keep the ball rolling. I fully appreciate that.”
“Perhaps,” mused his wife, as he rose, “it’s because you didn’t get the son-in-law you wanted. And yet he was highly coloured, too.”
The Professor made no reply to this. Lillian had been fiercely jealous of Tom Outland. As he left the house, he was reflecting that people who are intensely in love when they marry, and who go on being in love, always meet with something which suddenly or gradually makes a difference. Some¬ times it is the children, or the grubbiness of being poor, sometimes a second infatuation. In their own case it had been, curiously enough, his pupil, Tom Outland.
St. Peter had met his wife in Paris, when he was but twenty-four, and studying for his doctorate. She too was studying there. French people thought her an English girl because of her gold hair and fair complexion. With her really radiant charm, she had a very interesting mind—but it was quite wrong to call it mind, the connotation was
—49—
