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And now will you both please be gone at once? quick once? quick march!" And taking his wife and daughter by the shoulders, he turned them both forcibly out, and sat down to make his final preparations for a lecture that afternoon on the "feminism" of Euripides. Meanwhile Connie Bledlow and her maid were walking quickly down the Broad towards the busy Cornmarket with its shops.
Pryce that Connie knew no one to-night, except Mr. Sorell and Mr. Falloden." The hall grew more crowded; the talk more furious. Lord Glaramara insisted, with the wilfulness of the man who can do as he pleases, that Constance Bledlow whoever else came and went should stay beside him. "You can't think what I owed to her dear people in Rome three years ago!" he said to the Vice-Chancellor.
Falloden stood a little apart, in a dead silence, his eyes wandering occasionally from the figure on the bed to the open window, through which could be seen the summer sky, and a mounting sun, just touching the college roofs. The college clock struck half past four. Not two hours since Radowitz and Constance Bledlow had held the eyes of Oxford in the Magdalen ballroom.
The daughter, Lady Constance Bledlow, had been herself attacked by the influenza epidemic which had killed her mother, and the double blow of her parents' deaths, coming on a neurasthenic condition, had hit her youth rather hard.
His blood leapt. He recognised Constance Bledlow, and he supposed the other lady was Mrs. Mulholland. Constance on her side knew in a moment from the bearing of his head and shoulders who was the tall man approaching them. She spoke hurriedly to Mrs. Mulholland. "Do you mind if I stop and speak to Mr. Falloden?" Mrs. Mulholland shrugged her shoulders "Do as you like, my dear.
"When did you ever do such a thing in Rome, or when we were travelling?" His look betrayed his feeling. "Ah, but you were a little girl then, and now " "Now" she said impatiently "I am just Constance Bledlow, as I was then to you. But I don't give away my Christian name to everybody. I don't like, for instance, being forced to give it to Aunt Ellen!"
I do think, sir, as the fellows should stop it." Sorell agreed, and went off to the surgery, thinking furiously. Suppose the boy's hand and his fine talent had been permanently injured by that arrogant bully, Falloden, and his set! And Constance Bledlow had been entangling herself with him in spite of what anybody could say!
And slipping up her loose sleeve, she showed an arm, at which Constance Bledlow laughed. And her laugh touched her face with something audacious something wild which transformed it. "I shall take care how I offend you!" Nora nodded over her tea. "Your maid was shocked. She said I might as well have been a man." "It's quite true," sighed Mrs. Hooper. "You always were such a tomboy, Nora."
And in front a tall, long-limbed cavalry officer in the Queen's household, bowing to Constance Bledlow, as he comes back, breathless and radiant from the race he has just won, his hand tight upon the reins, his athlete's body swaying to each motion of his horse, his black eyes laughing into hers. Why, she had imagined herself in love with him for a whole week!
But it was not the loss of money or power that was separating him from Constance Bledlow. He knew her well enough by now to guess that in spite of her youth and her luxurious bringing up, there was that in her which was rapidly shaping a character capable of fighting circumstance, as her heart might bid. If she loved a man she would stand by him.
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