“To run up his little bill, my dear.  You don’t imagine he comes for the pleasure of seeing you?”

“I never imagine anything,” said the little arithmetic teacher with some truth.

But they had by no means seen the last of him.  If the Old Lady’s theory was correct, Cautley must have been the most grossly avaricious of young men.  The length of his visits was infamous, their frequency appalling.  He kept on coming long after Miss Quincey was officially and obviously well; and on the most trivial, the most ridiculous pretexts.  It was “just to see how she was getting on,” or “because he happened to be passing,” or “to bring that book he told her about.”  He had prescribed a course of light literature for Miss Quincey and seemed to think it necessary to supply his own drugs.  To be sure he brought a great many medicines that you cannot get made up at the chemist’s, insight, understanding, sympathy, the tonic of his own virile youth; and Heaven only knows if these things were not the most expensive.

All the time Miss Quincey was trying to keep up with the new standard imposed on the staff.  Hitherto she had laboured under obvious disadvantages; now, in her leisurely convalescence, sated as she was with time, she wallowed openly and wantonly in General Culture.  And it seemed that the doctor had gone in for General Culture too.  He could talk to her for ever about Shakespeare, Tennyson and Browning.  Miss Quincey was always dipping into those poets now, always drawing water from the wells of literature.  By the way, she was head over heels in debt to Sordello, and was working double time to pay him off.  She reported her progress with glee.  It was “only a hundred and thirty-eight more pages, Dr. Cautley.  In forty-six days I shall have finished Sordello.”

“Then you will have done what I never did in my whole life.”

It amused Cautley to talk to Miss Quincey.  She wore such an air of adventure; she was so fresh and innocent in her excursions into the realms of gold; and when she sat handling her little bits of Tennyson and Browning as if they had been rare nuggets recently dug up there, what could he do but feign astonishment and interest?  He had travelled extensively in the realms of gold.  He was acquainted with all the poets and intimate with most; he knew some of them so well as to be able to make jokes at their expense.  He was at home in their society.  Beside his light-hearted intimacy Miss Cursiter’s academic manner showed like the punctilious advances of an outsider.  But he was terribly modern this young man.  He served strange gods, healers and regenerators whose names had never penetrated to St. Sidwell’s.  Some days he was really dreadful; he shook his head over the Idylls of the King, made no secret of his unbelief in The Princess, and shamelessly declared that a great deal of In Memoriam would go where Mendelssohn and the old crinolines have gone.