Only on Sunday afternoons was the house thrown open to visitors; then Jehane would offer tea to ill-at-ease young bloods, while her father fingered his beard and made awkward efforts to be affable, and her mother, ignoring the guests, sat bolt upright in her chair and slumbered. What a look of relief came into the tanned faces of the men when they caught up their hats and departed. They had come as a duty to see not Jehane but her father; and now they went off to their pleasures. Oh, those Sunday afternoons, how they made her shudder! Often she marveled at her parents--what had brought them together? To her way of thinking, they knew so little about love and could so easily have dispensed with one another. Like dignified sleepy house-cats, they sat on distant sides of the domestic hearth, heedless of everything save to be undisturbed.--Ah, when she married, life would become intense, ecstatic--one throb of passion! There was a story current in the 'Varsity of how the Professor cared for Mrs. Usk. He had taken her for a drive in a dog-cart, he sitting in front and she, characteristically, by choice at the back. Deep in thought, he had jolted through country-lanes. Her presence did not occur to him till he had returned to Oxford and had drawn up before his house; then he perceived that she was not there and must have tumbled out. Some hours later, having retraced his journey, he found her by the roadside with a broken leg. For the next three months the greatest living Homeric scholar did penance, wheeling an exacting lady in a bathchair. Doubtless, he planned his great studies of the Iliad as he trundled, and the chair's occupant constructed English renderings of Scandinavian legends. At all events, next autumn they each had a book published. These were the influences under which Jehane grew up. Her parents were more like children to her than parents, gentle and utterly absorbed in themselves; they were no earthly use when it came to marriage. She could not apply to them for help; they would have thought her indelicate, if they had thought about it at all. Probably they would not have understood. Sometimes marriage came to girls--sometimes it didn't; nobody was to blame whether it did or didn't. That would have been their way of summing up. Meanwhile Jehane was twenty-five; she had begun to abandon hope, when the great change occurred--it commenced with William Barrington. It was early summer. The streets had been washed clean by rain and were now haunted by strange sweet perfumes which drifted over walls from hidden college-gardens. Nan had driven in from Cassingland and had come to Jehane for lunch and shelter. It was afternoon; the sun was shining tearfully over glistening turrets and drenched tree-tops.