Jennie said, "Yes," if it was a good one.
"This is one of the best," the little lady went on, pushing forward a volume that happened to be lying at her hand, "if you'd care to take it."
It was _The Egoist_, by George Meredith, and Jennie accepted it as something foreordained.
"You could have two more books if you wanted them--now that you're here."
The girl thought it was--chapel spires--especially French ones.
The kindly little gentleman, being accustomed to this kind of search, was called into counsel.
In the end she selected a work on the old churches of Paris, which she thought might give her the information she desired.
Here she was on safer ground. The English name had caught her ear with more precision than the foreign ones.
"Have you got anything about a Lady Hamilton?"
Again there was an echo from Jennie's memory. Romney was the man who couldn't paint _her_ because he was too Georgian. She began to see how Mrs. Collingham could play with names as she might with tennis balls. Since there was everything else at Marillo Park, there must also be a public library.
Arrived at home, she secreted her volumes under her bed. She could read at night, and by scraps in the daytime. If Ted or Gussie were to learn that she was trying to inform her mind, they would guy her with as little mercy as if they caught her in that still more offensive crime, the improvement of her speech.
That Bob Collingham was at ease in his conscience as to sailing to South America and leaving behind him an unacknowledged wife will hardly be supposed; but the true situation did not present itself to him till after he and Jennie had said their good-bys. He had tried to see her again on the following day to take counsel as to the immediate publication of their marriage, and only her refusal to meet him had frustrated that intention. But the more he pondered the more the thing he had done seemed little to his credit. On the morning of the day on which he sailed, he rose with the resolve to tell the whole truth to his father.
Had he known the facts, that Jennie had actually been to Collingham Lodge, that his mother knew of the marriage, that his father, without knowing of the marriage, was aware of his infatuation, he would have made a clean breast of it. But the habit of domestic life being strong, it seemed impossible to spring the confession in the middle of a peaceful breakfast. His mother had come down to the table for this parting meal and was already half in tears; his father concealed a genuine emotion behind the morning paper; Edith said she wondered what would happen to them all before they met again. The possibilities evoked were so significant that the mother said, sharply: