I'd got resigned to failure when I read your lectures, and they wakened
me to hope again, because they showed me that I've done every possible
thing wrong. If you do come, please write a very long time in advance
because we are thirty miles from the station and only go in for letters
occasionally. If you can't come, I'll go on worrying with the lectures
until I understand without you.
"Yours sincerely,
MARCELLA LASHCAIRN FARNE."
She fastened the letter up in between two books. It was three months
before she read in a week-old Sydney "Sunday Times" that Professor
Kraill, the eminent biologist, "whose fame in his newer field of
research had preceded him to the Antipodes," was to lecture at Sydney
University during the next three months. Marcella did not open the
letter; she posted it to Sydney University and left the issue in the
hands of the forces that had made her write it.
Professor Kraill got it when he was being bored to death in Sydney and
he rather discredited the sincerity of it for he was being wearied to
death by lion-hunters. Eminene men from the Old Country either get feted
or cut in the Colonies. He was feted because he happened to arrive at a
time when "culture" was fashionable, and Shakespeare Societies, Ibsen
Evenings, History Saturday Afternoons and Science Sundays were the rage.
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