o it, somebody who knew her father
better. And she said that nobody could do it, nobody did know him;
there was nobody's name that would give the value to the thing that
Burton's would. That was handsome of her, Burton said. And he seems
to have taken refuge from this dangerous praise in a modesty that
was absurd, and that he knew to be absurd in a man who had got
Lankester's "Life" on his hands. And Antigone saw through it; she
saw through it at once. But she didn't see it all; he hadn't the
heart to let her see his real reason, that he couldn't do them both.
He couldn't do Wrackham after Lankester, nor yet, for Lankester's
sake, before. And he couldn't, for his own sake, do him at any time.
It would make him too ridiculous.

And in the absence of his real reason he seems to have been
singularly ineffective. He just sat there saying anything that came
into his head except the one thing. He rather shirked this part of
it; at any rate, he wasn't keen about telling me what he'd said,
except that he'd tried to change the subject. I rather suspected him
of the extreme error of making love to Antigone in order to keep her
off it.

Finally she made a bargain with him. She said that if he did it she
would marry him whenever he liked (she had considered their
engagement broken off, though he hadn't). But (there Antigone was
adamant) if he didn't, if he cared so little about pleasing her, she
wouldn't marry him at all.

Then he said of course he did care; he would do anything to please
her, and if she was going to take a mean advantage and to put it
that way----

And of course she interrupted him and said he didn't see her point;
she wasn't putting it that way; she wasn't going to take any
advantage, mean or otherwise; it was a question of a supreme, a
sacred obligation. How _could_ she marry a man who disregarded, who
was capable of disregarding, her father's dying wish? And that she
stuck to.

I can't tell you now whether she was merely testing him, or whether
she was determined, in pure filial piety, to carry the thing
through, and saw, knowing her hold on him, that this was the way and
the only way, or whether she actually did believe that for him, too,
the obligation was sacred and supreme. Anyhow she stuck to it. Poor
Burton said he didn't think it was quite fair of her to work in that
way, but that, rather than lose her, rather than lose Antigone, he
had given in.

VI

He had taken the papers--the documents-