“No, I won’t! Not at all. You don’t need her to make curtains. I can’t have this room changed if I’m going to work here. He can take the sewing-machine—yes. But put her back on the chest where she belongs, please. She does very well there.” St. Peter had got to the door, and stood with his back against it.
Augusta rested her burden on the edge of the chest.
“But next week I’ll be working on Mrs. St. Peter’s clothes, and I’ll need the forms. As the boy’s here, he’ll just wheel them over,” she said soothingly.
“I’m damned if he will! They shan’t be wheeled. They stay right there in their own place. You shan’t take away my ladies. I never heard of such a thing!”
Augusta was vexed with him now, and a little ashamed of him. “But, Professor, I can’t work without my forms. They’ve been in your way all these years, and you’ve always complained of them, so don’t be contrary, sir.”
“I never complained, Augusta. Perhaps of certain disappointments they recalled, or of cruel biological necessities they imply—but of them individually, never! Go and buy some new ones for remind me when it’s All Souls’ day, or Ember day, or Maundy Thursday, or anything?”
Augusta said she must be leaving. St. Peter heard her well-known tread as she descended the stairs. How much she reminded him of, to be sure! She had been most at the house in the days when his daughters were little girls and needed so many clean frocks. It was in those very years that he was beginning his great work; when the desire to do it and the difficulties attending such a project strove together in his mind like Macbeth’s two spent swimmers—years when he had the courage to say to himself: “I will do this dazzling, this beautiful, this utterly impossible thing!”