"I know, Aunt. I am very sorry."
"You are not in the least sorry. You are pleased. I can see it in your face."
Judith looked out at the wet black streets going past, the oil lamps hung with drizzle, a link-boy running alongside a sedan chair. She did not feel pleased. She felt as she had felt as a child when she had been sick in the night and the fever broke towards dawn: hollow, and light, and very clear.
"He did not even look," she said. "Did you see, Aunt? I showed him the sign and he did not even look at it. He looked at the gallery."
"Of course he looked at the gallery. The gallery was where the Duchess of Wrexham was sitting. Do you know who else was sitting in the gallery? Mrs. Fenwick, who dines with Lady Jersey on Thursdays." Mrs. Gage pressed a handkerchief to her lips. "It will be all over London by Tuesday. A young woman of no family stood up at the Institution and lectured Sir Augustus Threlkeld on his arithmetic. And it is no use you telling me you were right, because it does not matter in the least whether you were right."
"It matters to the men who will use the tables, Aunt."
Mrs. Gage was silent for a moment.
"Your father," she said at last, in a different voice, "used to say just that sort of thing. In just that tone. And look where it got him."
Judith did not answer, because there was no answer to give. She knew very well where it had got him.
* * *
Thomas Penrose had been a master in the Royal Navy: not a commissioned officer, but the warrant officer whose business it was to navigate the ship, which was the same thing, he used to say, as being the only man aboard who knew where she was. He was the son of a Falmouth pilot. He had sailed with Cook's men in his youth, as a boy, and had learned his lunars in the great cabin of a sloop off the coast of New Holland from a master who had learned them from Maskelyne himself, and he had loved them ever after with a love that his daughter, as a little girl, had found very much more interesting than any other love she had been told about.
He had married, at forty, the daughter of a Lambeth surgeon, who had met him at a ball at Portsmouth and run away with him in the middle of a law term to the lasting scandal of her family. They had been very happy. They had had