"Did you?" he said, indulgently.
She bridled, rather, at his tone. "Well, if you do want to understand I'm not so entirely certain even now, sometimes," she said.
"You're jealous," he said, trying to make it into a joke.
"Of my own grandfather?" she asked, and laughed. "No, but I might be if he had a great granddaughter. That would be different, right enough."
"Liz, don't be absurd."
"Oh but I'm so much older'n you."
"Liz darling, we've been into this before."
"A whole eight years, Seb. It's not fair. When you're forty I'll have a Gapa head. Think of that."
"I have," he said, and sighed.
"There you are you see, you sigh, which is just what I mean," she pointed out. "And, if you're like you are now, what will it be when our time really comes. Isn't it extraordinary? One starts out light as a feather, then everything gets difficult." Her voice was despairing.
"If you care to know, I can't abide him."
"Who?" she asked, for, in her distress, she had lost track of the conversation.
"Your grandfather."
"Don't be so ridiculous," she said in a most friendly way. "You know you dote on Gapa."
"What makes you say?"
"Why, it's in everything you do when you're together. Even if you're both just chatting, hard at it, your own voice drops you respect him so much and, poor dear, he's got to such a state of deafness he doesn't catch what's said."
"Do I?" he asked, guardedly.
"No-one has any idea of how they are," she explained. "And he adores you."
"Are you sure?" the young man enquired, not at all convinced.
"There you go, you see. The moment I tell, I can judge from your voice you're delighted. Oh darling, am I being very difficult, again?"
"Of course not, Liz, but I would like to get this untangled."
"Sometimes I can't imagine how you put up with me," she said, putting his arm in hers to press it to her side. "And who am I to be jealous of my own dear, dear Gapa if he is, even in part, the reason why you come over so often? Because I've a lot more to be grateful to him about then, haven't I? Oh when I'm well again I shall make things up to him, you've no notion how much, and should everything go right, when I come through this, I'll make it up to you too, my darling, even if it takes me the rest of my life, and all my breath."
He kissed her as they walked on. "Don't take this so hard, Liz," he said.
"You're such a brute," she said tenderly.
"What's this?" he asked.
"To make me love you like I do," she said.
"That's my whole point," he took her up. "We can't help ourselves, can we? Things happen. When two people fall in love it's not their fault, surely? They can't help it."
"It must be the fault of one of them."
"How can you say that, dear?"
"When the girl is so much older, then she's to blame."
"You know I'm a fatalist," he said with an effort. "I don't know any serious economist who isn't. It's an occupational risk with economists." He used a sort of bantering tone with which to speak of his profession. The trick he had with a conversation whereby he would bring it to what he considered to be the level of the person he addressed, was more highly developed when with Elizabeth than it was when he spoke to Mr Rock; in other company, it was the impulse which led him to do his imitations. She was aware of this. She did not approve.
"You say that just for me," she told him.
"I don’t. Why should I?"
"But you can't pretend about us, and that we know each other, was just luck," she complained. "With all we might mean," she added. "You cheapen it."
"Well to go on as we do is cheap," he said, apologetically.
"Oh you'll never forgive once all this is over, I know you won't," she cried out, then stopped so as to face him. He turned away in distress. "Well?" she said. "You see, you can't even look. My darling, I'm so beastly." But she stood on there, and did not kiss him. Misery paralysed her.
"I'm so worried for you," he said at last, bringing out the truth.
"Because you're an economist, or why? Because you think if it wasn't me then it might just as well be another girl?"
"Now Liz," he said. "There was nothing further from my mind."
"What in particular are you worried about, then?"
"About your grandfather and you," he said, weakly.
"Why, what d'you mean," she demanded. "He's everything, I worship the very ground he treads. He works his poor old fingers to the bone for me. Without him I don't think I could go on." She, in her turn, swung round to show her back to Sebastian.
"Look," he said, "please be sensible," and his voice grated. "I can't imagine what you suppose I'm trying to make out. It's Miss Edge and Miss Baker's the trouble."
"Oh?" she asked, faced the man once more, with an expression of great vagueness.
"You're both of you a brace of innocents where those two women are concerned."
"My dear," she said. "You don't know Gapa very well if you think it. He's a match for two old spinsters!"
"He's not of this world, Liz," Sebastian objected.
"He's forgotten more of her twists and turns than you'll ever learn," she said. "There."
"I know, but so rash."
"Careful Seb, you can go too far, you know."
"I'm worried about this election. You understand what he is. He'll refuse what they offer, he'll simply disdain the whole thing."
"After what he's done for everyone in this country, I'd say he had a right to do as he liked," she announced, for her own purposes ignoring the fact that she had pressed her grandfather to a certain course only the night before.
"And I insist you can't, my dear girl. No-one can, these days."
"Don't be so absurd."
"But it's the State, Liz," he said. "What the old man will do is to wait till he's elected, then he'll refuse whatever they offer. And offend the powers that be very seriously. You know how he never even opens his correspondence."
"Oh but he does over important things," she lied, to reassure herself. "Besides they would never dare, with men like Mr Hargreaves in the inner circles to protect the three of us."
"It's his age, Liz. Any man as old stretches back to the bad times. He's suspect just because of the years he's lived. They won't like it."
"Then they'll have to swallow their silliness," she said. "Why, he's famous, he's one of the ornaments of the State."
"Look," he explained. "In the class of work your grandfather did they're just lyric poets. After twenty-five they're burned right out. He made his proof of his great theory when he was twenty-one. And he's seventy-six now."
"All the more wonderful then, isn't he?"
"Yes, but don't you realise his idea is poison to the younger men, who think they've exploded it?"
"That's only jealousy."
"I still maintain it would be very dangerous for him to go on as if everything was just plain sailing."
"Oh, if you're going to lose your nerve now, my dear, what on earth, I mean can you imagine, of all the beastly things to happen… oh what will become of you and me?"
"There," he said, genuinely disturbed, "I've upset you and that was the last I intended, the very last," he added. But she was not done yet.
"And what's all this to do with Miss Baker and Miss Edge?" she demanded, recollecting the way he had opened the conversation. She caught him out. He could not even remember how he had brought these ladies in. So he kissed her.
Miss Marchbanks, with Mr Rock's Persian on her lap, sat waiting in the sanctum for one of the senior students, Moira. Extremely shortsighted, she had taken off her spectacles and put these on Miss Edge's desk as though, in the crisis, at a time when she had been left in charge, she wished to look inwards, to draw on hid reserves, and thus to meet the drain on her resolution which this absence of the two girls had opened like an ulcer high under the ribs, where it fluttered, a blood stained dove with tearing claws.