Chapter 16

He proposed in December, in the office, in the half-hour before the afternoon session.It was, as proposals went, not particularly ceremonial. He had the sense that ceremony with Agnes Burch was a form of management, and that she would receive the honest version better than the theatrical one, which meant plain words, direct gaze, no preamble.He told her that he had been thinking since September about what his life had been before Rothbury and what it was afterward, and that the most significant difference was the quality of the thinking he did in the fortnights between Thursdays, which was sharper, and more directed, and more honest than the thinking he had done before. And that he attributed this to the specific influence of a woman who had handed him a child's composition book instead of a financial prospectus, and had meant what she said about effective and honest being different things.He told her that the distance between Marquis and schoolmistress was real, and that he did not intend to pretend otherwise, but that the distance was a fact of position and not a fact of character; and that character was the thing he had been assessing for three months, and had found—in precise and specific terms across forty Thursdays, and one Sunday service, and four afternoon sessions, and several arguments about the enclosure of the southern field, and one memorable disagreement about whether Thomas Buley should be permitted to try the older children's arithmetic—to be entirely, specifically worth it.Agnes Burch listened to all of it. She sat across the desk with her hands folded, and she listened the way she listened to everything: with the full attention that was her manner in the presence of things that required it, which was most things.And when he finished, she was quiet for a moment."The disagreement about the arithmetic," she said."Yes?""I was right," she said. "He was ready.""I was aware of that by the end of the disagreement," he said. "I was not aware of it at the beginning, which was why it was a disagreement.""You concede gracefully," she said."You correct without triumph," he said. "Which is rarer."She looked at the desk between them and then at him, and the full expression was there: not the beginning of it, not the architecture of it, but the completed version—warm and direct and entirely itself. Agnes Burch in the room she had built on a December Thursday, with the children arriving in twenty minutes, and the endowment signed, and the foundation permanent, and the moment exactly this."The foundation will be spoken of," she said."Yes."

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