Marjorie broke off abruptly, colouring to the roots of her hair, as she remembered the existence of her tutor’s wife. A girl not ignorant of Spanish only; a girl who could just overcome the difficulties of the Prayer-book and Lessons, perhaps, or write a letter without any glaringly bad spelling, on a push. ‘If one had time to spare in these long summer days, Miss Bartrand?’ Geoffrey Arbuthnot found a pleasure it had been hard to him to account for in her confusion. ‘I was going to say I would teach you Spanish. As if Spanish mattered! As if there were not nobler, lovelier things in life than book-learning. But that was a real Bartrand idea. We Bartrands, mouldering among our owls in this old place, cannot see daylight clear. We think too much of ourselves. Our minds are as narrow as our garden paths. I teach you Spanish, indeed! I’ll tell you what I call that proposal.’ She leaned across till her sweet bud of a face was close to Geoffrey’s, and spoke with a suspension of the breath. ‘I call it a bit of _devilish_ Bartrand pride and stiff-neckedness.’ Geff started, with a pantomime of horror, from the adjective italicised. ‘You know the meaning of Tintajeux?--Tint-à-jeu in old Norman. You English in Cornwall say Tintagel--the Devil’s castle. A fit abode for us. Look at grandpapa! He quarrelled seven years ago with M. Noirmont, the rector of our next parish, over a Latin quantity. Never in this world will grandpapa speak again to that innocent old man.’ ‘A wrong quantity is no jesting matter,’ observed Geoffrey Arbuthnot. ‘Then he has three daughters, my aunts. Neither of the three has spoken to the others or to him for five-and-twenty years. No vulgar quarrel to start with. “We Bartrands wage war on a grand Napoleonic scale,” says the Seigneur. “An exchange of reproachful epithets is sheer waste of brain-power.” The marriage of each sister in succession wounded the other sisters’ pride. All wounded grandpapa’s. It was quite simple.’ ‘You colour highly, Miss Bartrand.’ ‘I am giving you sketches from life. No colouring could be too high for showing up our Bartrand traits, the little faults of our virtues, as the French say, prettily.’ Geoffrey felt himself on the road to disenchantment. The girl might have marvellous eyes, a wealth of dusky hair, tones of liquid music, a sunburnt hand that was a poem. The heart within her was hard to the core. Linda Thorne, by hidden affinity, perhaps, was not so very far out in her judgments. Marjorie knew too much, had learned bitter lessons in human nature, not from books, but from keen reading of the men and women nighest to herself in blood. ‘Yes, we think too highly of our small talents. I, with my shallowness, to propose teaching a Bachelor of Arts anything! I ought to be grateful to Mr. Arbuthnot for condescending to read with such a pupil. Now, which three mornings in the week could you give me?’