'He should have taken care more of his own reputation for the sake of his Work!'

Valentine considered this thin, ecstatic spinster with ironic curiosity.

'Of course, if you've sat...if you're still sitting at father's feet as much as all that,' she conceded, 'it gives you a certain right to be careful about his reputation...All the same I wish you would tell me what that person said on the phone!'

The bust of Miss Wanostrocht moved with a sudden eagerness towards the edge of her table.

'It's precisely because of that,' she said, 'that I want to speak to you first...That I want you to consider...Valentine said:

'Because of my father's reputation...Look here, did that person--Lady Macmaster!--speak to you as if you were me? Our names are near enough to make it possible.'

'You're,' Miss Wanostrocht said, 'as one might say, the fine fruit of the product of his views on the education of women. And if you...It's been such a satisfaction to me to observe in you such a...a sound, instructed head on such a...oh, you know, sane body...And then...An earning capacity. A commercial value. Your father, of course, never minced words...' She added:

'I'm bound to say that my interview with Lady Mac-master...Who surely isn't a lady of whom you could say that you disapprove. I've read her husband's work. It surely--you'd say, wouldn't you?--conserves some of the ancient fire.'

'He,' Valentine said, 'hasn't a word of Latin to his tail. He makes his quotations out, if he uses them, by means of school-cribs...I know his method of work, you know.'

It occurred to Valentine to think that if Edith Ethel really had at first taken Miss Wanostrocht for herself there might pretty obviously be some cause for Miss Wanostrocht's concern for her father's reputation as an intimate trainer of young women. She figured Edith Ethel suddenly bursting into a description of the circumstances of that man who was without furniture and did not appear to recognize the porter. The relations she might have described as having existed between her and him might well worry the Head of a Great Public School for Middle Class Girls. She had no doubt been described as having had a baby. A disagreeable and outraged current invaded her feelings...

It was suddenly obscured by a recrudescence of the thought that had come to her only incidentally in the hall. It rushed over her with extraordinary vividness now, like a wave of warm liquid...If it had really been that fellow's wife who had removed his furniture what was there to keep them apart? He couldn't have pawned or sold or burnt his furniture whilst he had been with the British Expeditionary Force in the Low Countries! He couldn't have without extraordinary difficulty! Then...What should keep them apart?...Middle Class Morality? A pretty gory carnival that had been for the last four years! Was this then Lent, pressing hard on the heels of Saturnalia? Not so hard as that, surely! So that if one hurried...What on earth did she want, unknown to herself?

She heard herself saying, almost with a sob, so that she was evidently in a state of emotion:

'Look here: I disapprove of this whole thing: of what my father has brought me to! Those people...the brilliant Victorians talked all the time through their hats. They evolved a theory from anywhere and then went brilliantly mad over it. Perfectly recklessly...Have you noticed Pettigul One?...Hasn't it occurred to you that you can't carry on violent physical jerks and mental work side by side? I ought not to be in this school and I ought not to be what I am!'

At Miss Wanostrocht's perturbed expression she said to herself:

'What on earth am I saying all this for? You'd think I was trying to cut loose from this school! Am I?'

Nevertheless her voice was going on:

'There's too much oxygenation of the lungs, here. It's unnatural. It affects the brain, deleteriously. Pettigul One is an example of it. She's earnest with me and earnest with her books. Now she's gone dotty. Most of them it only stupifies.'

It was incredible to her that the mere imagination that that fellow's wife had left him should make her spout out like this--for all the world like her father spouting out one of his ingenious theories!...It had really occurred to her once or twice to think that you could not run a dual physical and mental existence without some risk. The military physical developments of the last four years had been responsible for a real exaggeration of physical values. She was aware that in that Institution, for the last four years, she had been regarded as supplementing if not as actually replacing both the doctor and the priest...But from that to evolving a complete theory that the Pettigul's lie was the product of an over-oxygenated brain was going pretty far...

Still, she was prevented from taking part in national rejoicings; pretty certainly Edith Ethel had been talking scandal about her to Miss Wanostrocht. She had the right to take it out in some sort of exaggerated declamation!

'It appears,' Miss Wanostrocht said, 'for we can't now go into the question of the whole curriculum of the school, though I am inclined to agree with you. What by the bye is the matter with Pettigul One? I thought her rather a solid sort of girl. But it appears that the wife of a friend...perhaps it's only a former friend of yours, is in a nursing home.'

Valentine exclaimed:

'Oh, he...But that's too ghastly!'

'It appears,' Miss Wanostrocht said, 'to be rather a mess.' She added: 'That appears to be the only expression to use.'

For Valentine, that piece of news threw a blinding light upon herself. She was overwhelmingly appalled because that woman was in a nursing home. Because in that case it would not be sporting to go and see the husband! Miss Wanostrocht went on:

'Lady Macmaster was anxious for your advice.--It appears that the only other person that could look after the interests of...of your friend: his brother...'

Valentine missed something out of that sentence. Miss Wanostrocht talked too fluently. If people wanted you to appreciate items of sledge-hammering news they should not use long sentences. They should say:

'He's mad and penniless. His brother's dying: his wife's just been operated on.' Like that! Then you could take it in; even if your mind was rioting about like a cat in a barrel.

'The brother's...female companion,' Miss Wanostrocht was wandering on, 'though it appears that she would have been willing is therefore not available...The theory is that he--he himself, your friend, has been considerably unhinged by his experiences in the war. Then...Who in your opinion should take the responsibility of looking after his interests?'

Valentine heard herself say:

'Me!'

She added:

'Him! Looking after him.