Again and again a skirmish over the afternoon tea that the girl
students had inaugurated left Hill with flushed cheeks and a tattered
temper, and the debating society noticed a new quality of sarcastic
bitterness in his speeches.
You will understand now how it was necessary, if only in the interests of
humanity, that Hill should demolish Wedderburn in the forthcoming
examination and outshine him in the eyes of Miss Haysman; and you will
perceive, too, how Miss Haysman fell into some common feminine
misconceptions. The Hill-Wedderburn quarrel, for in his unostentatious way
Wedderburn reciprocated Hill's ill-veiled rivalry, became a tribute to her
indefinable charm; she was the Queen of Beauty in a tournament of scalpels
and stumpy pencils. To her confidential friend's secret annoyance, it even
troubled her conscience, for she was a good girl, and painfully aware,
from Ruskin and contemporary fiction, how entirely men's activities are
determined by women's attitudes. And if Hill never by any chance mentioned
the topic of love to her, she only credited him with the finer modesty for
that omission.
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