“It depends,” said the Dean. “I don’t believe nine women out of ten would care a dash.”
“That’s a monstrous thing to say,” cried Miss Hillyard.
“You think a wife might feel sensitive about her husband’s honour-even if it was sacrificed on her account?” said Miss Stevens. “Well-I don’t know.”
“I should think,” said Miss Chilperic, stammering a little in her earnestness, “she would feel like a man who-I mean, wouldn’t it be like living on somebody’s immoral earnings?”
“There,” said Peter, “if I may say so, I think you are exaggerating. The man who does that-if he isn’t too far gone to have any feelings at all-is hit by other considerations, some of which have nothing whatever to do with ethics. But it is extremely interesting that you should make the comparison.” He looked at Miss Chilperic so intently that she blushed.
“Perhaps that was rather a stupid thing to say.”
“No. But if it ever occurs to people to value the honour of the mind equally with the honour of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort-and very different from the kind that is being made at the moment.”
Miss Chilperic looked so much alarmed at the idea of fostering a social revolution that only the opportune entry of two Common Room scouts to remove the coffee-cups and relieve her of the necessity of replying seemed to have saved her from sinking through the floor.
“Well,” said Harriet, “I agree absolutely with Miss Chilperic. If anybody did a dishonourable thing and then said he did it for one’s own sake, it would be the last insult. How could one ever feel the same to him again?”
“Indeed,” said Miss Pyke, “it must surely vitiate the whole relationship.”
“Oh, nonsense!” cried the Dean. “How many women care two hoots about anybody’s intellectual integrity? Only overeducated women like us. So long as the man didn’t forge a check or rob the till or do something socially degrading, most women would think he was perfectly justified. Ask Mrs. Bones the Butcher’s Wife or Miss Tape the Tailor’s Daughter how much they would worry about suppressing a fact in a mouldy old historical thesis.”
“They’d back up their husbands, in any case,” said Miss Allison. “My man, right or wrong, they’d say. Even if he did rob the till.”
“Of course they would,” said Miss Hillyard. “That’s what the man wants. He wouldn’t say thank you for a critic on the hearth.”
“He must have the womanly woman, you think?” said Harriet. “What is it, Annie? My coffee-cup? Here you are… Somebody who will say, ‘The greater the sin the greater the sacrifice-and consequently the greater devotion.’ Poor Miss Schuster-Slatt!… I suppose it is comforting to be told that one is loved whatever one does.”
“Ah, yes,” said Peter, in his reediest wood-wind voice:
“And these say: ‘No more now my knight
Or God’s knight any longer’-you,
Being than they so much more white,
So much more pure and good and true
Will cling to me for ever-
William Morris had his moments of being a hundred-percent manly man.”
“Poor Morris!” said the Dean.
“He was young at the time,” said Peter, indulgently. “It’s odd, when you come to think of it, that the expressions ‘manly’ and ‘womanly’ should be almost more offensive than their opposites. One is tempted to believe that there may be something indelicate about sex after all.”
“It all comes of this here eddication,” pronounced the Dean, as the door shut behind the last of the coffee-service. “Here we sit round in a ring dissociating ourselves from kind Mrs. Bones and that sweet girl, Miss Tape-”
“Not to mention,” put in Harriet, “those fine, manly fellows, the masculine Tapes and Boneses-”
“ And clacking on in the most unwomanly manner about intellectual integrity.”
“While I,” said Peter, “sit desolate in the midst, like a lodge in a garden of cucumbers.”
“You look it,” said Harriet, laughing. “The sole relic of humanity in a cold, bitter and indigestible wilderness.”
There was a laugh, and a momentary silence. Harriet could feel a nervous tension in the room-little threads of anxiety and expectation strung out, meeting, crossing, quivering. Now, they were all saying to themselves, now something is going to be said about IT. The ground has been surveyed, the coffee has been cleared out of the road, the combatants are stripped for action-now, this amiable gentleman with the well-filed tongue will come out in his true colours as an inquisitor, and it is all going to be very uncomfortable.
Lord Peter took out his handkerchief, polished his monocle carefully, readjusted it, looked rather severely at the Warden, and lifted up his voice in emphatic, pained and querulous complaint about the Corporation dump.
The Warden had gone, expressing courteous thanks to Miss Lydgate for the hospitality of the Senior Common Room, and graciously inviting his lordship to call upon her in her own house at any convenient time during his stay in Oxford. Various dons rose up and drifted away, murmuring that they had essays to look through before they went to bed. The talk had ranged pleasantly over a variety of topics. Peter had let the reins drop from his hands and let it go whither it would, and Harriet, realizing this, had scarcely troubled to follow it. In the end, there remained only herself and Peter, the Dean, Miss Edwards (who seemed to have taken a strong fancy to Peter’s conversation), Miss Chilperic, silent and half-hidden in an obscure position and, rather to Harriet’s surprise, Miss Hillyard.
The clocks struck eleven. Wimsey roused himself and said he thought he had better be getting along. Everybody rose. The Old Quad was dark, except for the glean of lighted windows; the sky had clouded, and a rising wind stirred the boughs of the beech-trees.
“Well, good-night,” said Miss Edwards. “I’ll see that you get a copy of that paper about blood-groups. I think you’ll find it of interest.”
“I shall, indeed,” said Wimsey. “Thank you very much.”
Miss Edwards strode briskly away.
“Good-night, Lord Peter.”
“Good-night, Miss Chilperic. Let me know when the social revolution is about to begin and I’ll come to die upon the barricades.”
“I think you would,” said Miss Chilperic, astonishingly, and, in defiance of tradition, gave him her hand.
“Good-night,” said Miss Hillyard, to the world in general, and whisked quickly past them with her head high.
Miss Chilperic flitted off into the darkness like a pale moth, and the Dean said, “Well!” And then, interrogatively, “Well?”
“Pass, and all’s well,” said Peter, placidly.
“There were one or two moments, weren’t there?” said the Dean. “But on the whole-as well as could be expected.”
“I enjoyed myself very much,” said Peter, with the mischievous note back in his voice.
“I bet you did,” said the Dean. “I wouldn’t trust you a yard. Not a yard.”
“Oh, yes, you would,” said he. “Don’t worry.”
The Dean, too, was gone.
“You left your gown in my room yesterday,” said Harriet “You’d better come and fetch it.”
“I brought yours back with me and left it at the Jowett Walk Lodge. Also your dossier. I expect they’ve been taken up.”
“You didn’t leave the dossier lying about!”
“What do you take me for? It’s wrapped up and sealed.”
They crossed the quad slowly.
“There are a lot of questions I want to ask, Peter.”
“Oh, yes. And there’s one I want to ask you. What is your second name? The one that begins with a D?”
“Deborah, I’m sorry to say. Why?”
“Deborah? Well, I’m damned. All right. I won’t call you by it. There’s Miss de Vine, I see, still working.”
The curtains of the Fellows’ window were drawn back this time, and they could see her dark, untidy head, bent over a book.