‘See ye guide it noo ye’ve got it.’
It was plain that the maxim emanated from Aunt Jean (seated there so upright and so silent on her cane-bottomed seat), and issued by way of her square-set chin through Leebie’s mouth, although the frock was Leebie’s and the impulse to give it Leebie’s too.
Martha suddenly wanted to kiss Aunt Leebie again. ‘But must I kiss Aunt Jean as well?’ she queried. And a wave of shyness flooded her.
Next morning she had to unpack the Japanese basket hamper (frayed to a hole at one of its corners) in which she had brought her clothes. She had to unpack it because Aunt Leebie came into her room too late to see her fold the gown.
‘I canna hae it whammlin’ aboot in there,’ she said. And she giggled her soft giggle.
That Martha was affected by this solidity and order, the Leggatt respectability towards which her mother yearned in vain, the girl herself did not perceive: though she gave certain signals of it after her return. Indifference to the household laxity, the unconcern with which, sunk in a dream or hot on the tracks of knowledge, she had viewed domestic turmoil as no affair of hers, altered − spasmodically only, it is true − to irritation and that to hesitant rebuke. Emmeline took the hints with unexpected meekness. She had the makings of respect for her daughter now that she was reconquering the citadel whence Emmeline had been exiled. Martha had visited at Muckle Arlo: henceforward she was allowed to be an individual. Emmeline accepted an occasional innovation, not because it was cleanly and made for order, not even because Aunt Jean arranged her matters so, but because Martha had been at Muckle Arlo. That Martha had been at Muckle Arlo was a step on towards the shining goal round which her fancies fluttered, the respectability she had foregone: though how indeed was she to reach it? Respectability was a habit of mind beyond her powers.
It was a habit of mind beyond Martha’s intentions. When the winter session opened in October, and her mind was steeped again in book-learning, she forgot household management. Respectability according to the Leggatt canons had little reality in a world of passionate pursuing, where the quarry, phantoms from a dead past flitting in shadow, grew more and more alive the hotter one’s pursuit. Her contact with it had nonetheless strengthened, unknown to herself, an inborn timidity that shrank from unlikeness to its fellows. It made her more sensitive to the deficiencies of her personal appearance. It was it that operated in her, on a day in the winter session, when Luke had said,
‘Oh, but you mustn’t go away, Marty. You must stay to tea. Old Dunster’s coming.’
His professor! Tongue-tied though she knew that she would be, Martha longed to meet him. But she said.
‘Oh, I can’t, Luke! Not with these old boots on.’
The old was a concession to public opinion. They were not really old; nor had she any better; but they were rough, clumsily cut, of thick unpliable leather that had crunkled into lurks about her ankles; country boots, and all the more unsuitable for the reception of Professor Dunster that Dussie was wearing the daintiest of black court shoes, with buckles whose silver gleam was lit with blue that answered the blue shimmer of her frock.
And Luke said,
‘Oh, your boots! − My dear Marty, do you suppose any one would ever look at your boots who could see your eyes?’
‘My eyes!’ she echoed, in such genuine astonishment that Luke and Dussie laughed aloud.
‘They’re nice eyes, you know,’ said Dussie. And she plumped herself on a cushion at Martha’s feet and craned up into her face.
‘If you had said Dussie’s eyes −’ Martha began.
‘Dussie? − Oh, she uses eye-shine. Pots of it. You have stars in yours.’
He loved to disparage Dussie’s beauty. She loved him to disparage it, paying him back with hot-head glee.
Seriously, he said,
‘You are a very lovely woman, Marty.’
‘Oh well,’ objected Dussie, ‘not very lovely, you know …’ and Martha, Singing up her head, was crying, ‘I don’t know what you mean, Luke! I’m ugly.’
‘True,’ he answered promptly. ‘Out of the running, you and I. We have both big noses.’
It was the same sensitiveness to any external oddity that operated on an afternoon in early spring when Luke, she felt resentfully, put her to public shame.
Beatrice among the Pots
She was wearing shoes that afternoon, trim, black, new − big, of course, because her feet were big; but respectable by any Leggatt standard, though, to be sure, they showed up the clumsiness of her ankles in their four-ply fingering home-knitted stockings. She was wearing also her Sunday costume. Emmeline had grumbled at both shoes and costume: wearing them to her school − a pretty-like palaver. Emmeline continued to talk of Martha’s University classes as ‘school’ and of the hours she spent in study as her ‘lessons’. So did Geordie, for the matter of that. ‘But they will never understand,’ Martha sighed to herself.
Emmeline’s displeasure notwithstanding, Martha wore the Sunday shoes and costume. Dussie had a tea-party and there was no time to come home and change. The tea-party in the parlance of the hour was a ‘hen-shine’: until Luke came in at five o’clock, bringing Macallister, there were no men present. Martha felt herself a dullard in more than clothing. The chatter was edged, and Miss Warrender, now President of the Sociological, with her raking wit and air of authority, turned the world inside out to the discomfort of one at least of its inhabitants. It was after Luke came in that someone, discussing another theme, took for granted Martha’s Honours course.
Martha said, ‘But I am not taking Honours.’
‘Not taking Honours? Everyone thinks you are.’
They overhauled the position. Miss Warrender in her adequate way (‘rather foolish, isn’t it?’ she asked) persuaded the assembly that in these modern days the passman was a nonentity.
‘An ordinary degree is cheap,’ she said. ‘Everyone specialises.’
She disposed of Martha’s pretensions to a share in the sunlight of the teaching profession without specialisation and an Honours degree, with the same thoroughness and decision wherewith Stoddart Semple and Mrs. Ironside had disposed of her pretensions to a degree at all.
‘Even financially, the extra year is worth it.’
The thought of Emmeline obtruded itself on Martha’s mind and she realized, hating the knowledge, that she did not wholly belong to the world in which she sat.
She became aware that Luke was speaking. He was speaking magisterially, with an air of authority that equalled Miss Warrender’s own.
‘That’s nonsense,’ she heard him say. ‘It’s quite wrong, most of this specialising. For teachers, anyhow. Teachers shouldn’t specialise − except in life. That’s their subject, really. A man doesn’t set out to teach mathematics, but life illuminated
