“I’m not a lady.”
Resting one hand on the table, he looked down into her eyes with an expression such as Letty had never before seen in a human face.
“I could myke a lydy of madam.”
At the sound of these quiet words, so confidently spoken, something passed through Letty’s frame to be described only by the hard-worked word, a thrill. It was a double current of vibration, partly of upleaping hope, partly of the desperate sense of her own limitations. A hundred points of gold dust were aflame in her irises as she said:
“You mean that you’d put me wise? Oh, but I’d never learn!”
“On the contrary, I think madam would pick up very quick.”
“And I’d never be able to talk the right––”
“I could learn madam to talk just as good as me.”
It seemed too much. She clasped her hands. It was the nearest point she had ever reached to ecstasy. “Oh, do you think you could? You talk somethin’ beautiful, you do!”
He smiled modestly. “I’ve always lived with the best people, and I suppose I ketch their wyes. I know 62 what a gentleman is—and a lydy. I know all a lydy’s little ’abits, and before two or three months was over madam ’ud ’ave them as natural as natural, if she wouldn’t think me overbold.”