"How gaes things with the lad at the House?"
"Alexander or James?"
"The one ye call Alexander."
"That is his name."
"I think that he's had ithers. That's a lad of mony lives!"
Strickland, halting by the rose-bush, looked at Mother Binning. "I
suppose we call it 'wisdom' when two feel alike. Now that's just what
I feel about Alexander Jardine! It's just feeling without
rationality."
"Eh?"
"There isn't any reason in it."
"I dinna know about 'reason.' There's _being_ in it."
The tutor made as if to speak further, then, with a shake of his head,
thought better of it. Thirty-five years old, he had been a tutor since
he was twenty, dwelling, in all, in four or five more or less
considerable houses and families. Experience, adding itself to innate
good sense, had made him slow to discuss idiosyncrasies of patrons or
pupils. Strong perplexity or strong feeling might sometimes drive him,
but ordinarily he kept a rein on speech. Now he looked around him.
"What high summer, lovely weather!"
"Oh aye! It's bonny. Will ye be gaeing, since ye have na mair to say?"
English Strickland laughed and said good-by to Mother Binning and
went. The ash-tree, the hazels that fringed the water, a point of
mossy rock, hid the cot. The drone of the wheel no longer reached his
ears. It was as though all that had sunk into the earth.
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