insufficiencies involved in Government or Royal Society grants; and
that Linda had not only endowed him with all her worldly goods--all
but those he had insisted in putting into settlement--but that she
had given him all her heart and confidence as well.

Still, he liked Honoria. She was eager to learn much else beyond the
hard-grained muses of the square and cube; she was the daughter of a
prosperous and boldly experimental physician, whose wife was a
champion of women's rights. So he pressed Honoria to come with her
mother and make the acquaintance of himself and Linda in Portland
Place.

Why was Michael Rossiter wedded to Linda Bennet when he was no more
than twenty-five, and she just past her coming of age? Because fresh
from Edinburgh and Cambridge and with a reputation for unusual
intuition in Biology and Chemistry he had come to be Science master
at a great College in the North, and thus meeting Linda at the
Philosophical Institute of Leeds had caused her to fall in love with
him whilst he lectured on the Cainozoic fauna of Yorkshire. He was
himself a Northumbrian of borderland stock: something of the Dane
and Angle, the Pict and Briton with a dash of the Gypsy folk: a
blend which makes the Northumbrian people so much more productive of
manly beauty, intellectual vivacity, bold originality than the
slow-witted, bulky, crafty Saxons of Yorkshire or the under-sized,
rugged-featured Britons of Lancashire.

Linda fell in love all in one evening with his fiery eyes, black
beard, the Northumbrian burr of his pronunciation, and the daring of
his utterances, though she could scarcely grasp one of his
hypotheses. Her uncle and aunt being narrowly pietistic she was
bored to death with the Old Testament, and Rossiter's scarcely
concealed contempt for the Mosaic story of creation captured her
intellect; while the physical attraction she felt was that which the
tall, handsome, resolute brunet has for the blue-eyed fluffy little
blonde. She openly made love to him over the tea and coffee served
at the "soiree" which followed the lecture. Her slow-witted guardian
had no objection to offer; and there were not wanting go-betweens to
urge on Rossiter with stories of her wealth and the expanding value
of her financial interests. He wanted to marry; he was touched by
her ill-concealed passion, found her pretty and appealingly
childlike. So, after a short wooing, he married her and her five
thousand pounds a year, and settled do