‘You bite your nails, and you don’t try to hide it.’ ‘What does that matter to anybody?’ he demanded irritably. ‘Nothing, except to yourself. I never knew anybody yet that bit his nails who was able to tell the truth. Not that that matters to you, I suppose you’ll say.’ ‘I do tell the truth sometimes,’ he declared in a tone of appealing _naïveté_. ‘And when I do, you don’t believe me.’ ‘When you do,’ she said, ‘you show a red light. That frightens me. It’s like a train whistling and screaming to say there’s going to be an accident.’ Whereat Mr. Trimblerigg put himself resolutely under the bed-clothes: and so she left him. Yet, in the end, she did him good. It is a pathetic fact that from that day Mr. Trimblerigg left off biting his nails, hoping, perhaps, that as they grew an instinct for truth would be born in him. Eventually he even developed a habit of letting them grow quite long: securing, to that extent, a sense of escape from the supervision of Davidina. I wish I could add that that little addition of grey growth made him become more truthful. But when in later years all his hair turned grey and he wore it long, almost like a woman’s, even that did not alter the fundamentals of his character. CHAPTER EIGHT _Where there’s a Will, there’s a Way_ On his return from college for the summer vacation, his course almost completed, Mr. Trimblerigg found Uncle Phineas with his feet gathered up for death, though not immediately. He was confined to the house and did not go out; presently did not even come downstairs. Caroline, of course, was still with him, somewhat colourless as a companion, but efficient as a housekeeper. It would be difficult to say whether she was also a True Believer, in the doctrinal sense, because to her doctrine meant nothing. She was one of those comfortable characters who, in matters of faith, can believe anything, and never actively disbelieve anything they are told by those whom they respect and look up to. Otherwise, in worldly affairs, she was quite sensible. When she opened the door to Mr. Trimblerigg she showed pleasure in his arrival. He called her ‘cousin,’ and kissed her, thereby committing himself to nothing but a more open acceptance of the kinship which had existed before intimacy began. Still it prepared the ground provisionally, and the blush with which she accepted the salutation made her look almost pretty: in her large cream-coloured way, with under-edges of pink, she was personable though she lacked personality; and she was very pleasant to touch, a point which with Mr. Trimblerigg mattered on the whole more than good looks, and very much more than intellect. In the balm of her smile she said, ‘Uncle has been expecting you.’ ‘So have you,’ said Mr. Trimblerigg; ‘and I’ve been expecting myself.’ Thus, footing it easily, he came into the house of his expectations, and went up to his uncle’s room.