“I do hope, Ewen, you won’t humour and spoil Constance too much!  Nora says now she’s dissatisfied with her room and wants to buy some furniture.  Well, let her, I say.  She has plenty of money, and we haven’t.  We have given her a great deal more than we give our own daughters—­”

“She pays us, my dear!”

Mrs. Hooper straightened her thin shoulders.

“Well, and you give her the advantage of your name and your reputation here.  It is not as though you were a young don, a nobody.  You’ve made your position.  Everybody asks us to all the official things—­and Connie, of course, will be asked, too.”

A smile crept round Dr. Hooper’s weak and pleasant mouth.

“Don’t flatter yourself, Ellen, that Connie will find Oxford society very amusing after Rome and the Riviera.”

“That will be her misfortune,” said Mrs. Hooper, stoutly.  “Anyway, she will have all the advantages we have.  We take her with us, for instance, to the Vice-Chancellor’s to-night?”

“Do we?” Dr. Hooper groaned.  “By the way, can’t you let me off, Ellen?  I’ve got such a heap of work to do.”

“Certainly not!  People who shut themselves up never get on, Ewen.  I’ve just finished mending your gown, on purpose.  How you tear it as you do, I can’t think!  But I was speaking of Connie.  We shall take her, of course—­”

“Have you asked her?”

“I told her we were all going—­and to meet Lord Glaramara.  She didn’t say anything.”

Dr. Hooper laughed.

“You’ll find her, I expect, a very independent young woman—­”

But at that moment his daughter Nora, after a hurried and perfunctory knock, opened the study door vehemently, and put in a flushed face.

“Father, I want to speak to you!”

“Come in, my dear child.  But I can’t spare more than five minutes.”

And the Reader glanced despairingly at a clock, the hands of which were pointing to half past ten a.m.  How it was that, after an eight o’clock breakfast, it always took so long for a man to settle himself to his work he really could not explain.  Not that his conscience did not sometimes suggest the answer, pointing to a certain slackness and softness in himself—­the primal shrinking from work, the primal instinct to sit and dream—­that had every day to be met and conquered afresh, before the student actually found himself in his chair, or lecturing from his desk with all his brains alert.  Anyway, the Reader, when there was no college or university engagement to pin him down, would stand often—­“spilling the morning in recreation”; in other words, gossiping with his wife and children, or loitering over the newspapers, till the inner monitor turned upon him.  Then he would work furiously for hours; and the work when done was good.  For there would be in it a kind of passion, a warmth born of the very effort and friction of the will which had been necessary to get it done at all.