an shook hands in silence with Howard, and went out with a
smile. "Oh, I shall be all right," he said.

Jack sate up late with Howard and treated him to a long grumble.

"I do hope to goodness you will come back to Cambridge," he said. "You
must simply make Maud come. You must use your influence, your beautiful
influence, of which we hear so much. Seriously, I do miss you here very
much, and so does everybody else. Your pupils are in an awful stew.
They say that you got them through the Trip without boring them, and
that Crofts bores them and won't get them through. This place rather
gets on my nerves now. The Dons don't confide in me, and I don't see
things from their angle, as my father says. I think you somehow managed
to keep them reasonable; they are narrow-minded men, I think."

"This is rather a shower of compliments," said Howard. "But I think I
very likely shall come back. I don't think Maud would mind."

"Mind!" said Jack, "why you wind that girl round your little finger.
She writes about you as if you were an archangel; and look here, I am
sorry I took a gloomy view. It's all right; you were the right person.
Freddy Guthrie would never have done for Maud--he's in a great way
about it still, but I tell him he may be thankful to have escaped. Maud
is a mountain-top kind of girl; she could never have got on without a
lot of aspirations, she couldn't have settled down to the country-house
kind of life. You are a sort of privilege, you know, and all that;
Freddy Guthrie would never have been a privilege."

"That's rather a horror!" said Howard; "you mustn't let these things
out; you make me nervous!"

Jack laughed. "If your brother-in-law mayn't say this to you, I don't
know who may. But seriously, really quite seriously, you are a bigger
person than I thought. I'll tell you why. I had a kind of feeling that
you ought not to let me speak to you as you do, that you ought to have
snapped my head off. And then you seemed too much upset by what I said.
I don't know if it was your tact; but you had your own way all the
time, with me and with everybody; you seemed to give way at every
point, and yet you carried out your programme. I thought you hadn't
much backbone--there, the cat's out; and now I find that we were all
dancing to your music. I like people to do that, and it amuses me to
find that I danced as obediently as anyone, when I really thought I
could make you do as I wished. I admire your way of going on: