However, she did not receive so much as a bare acknowledgment of her letter, and she convinced herself, perhaps a little regretfully, that Harry Vibart, offended by her request, had decided not to bother any more about her.
Meanwhile Edward had arrived. Edward was one of those young men of whom it can be postulated immediately that he could never have been called anything else except Edward. He was a tall and awkward, an extremely industrious, a clever and an immensely conceited young man, who hid the natural gloom established by years of nervous dyspepsia, or more bluntly by chronic indigestion, under a pretentious solemnity of manner. His arrival at Silchester coincided with a change of weather, and the rainy days that attended in his wake created in Jasmine's mind an impression that he was even more of a wet blanket than she might otherwise have thought. For the first few days he hung about the rooms like a low cloud, telling long stories about his tour in Brittany with Lord Gresham, stories that for the most part were about taking the wrong road and putting up at the wrong inn. When he had bored his family so successfully that every member of it had reached the point of regarding life from the standpoint of a nervous dyspeptic, he grew more cheerful and aired his latest discoveries in modern literature. Then he decided to keep a journal, with the intention, it was understood, of immortalizing his spleen. Like most people who keep journals, he was usually a day or two in arrears, and when people saw him pompously entering the room with a notebook under his arm, they used to hasten anywhere to escape being asked what he had done on Thursday morning between eleven and one. At last the sun appeared again, and Edward, looking at Jasmine—by the intensity of his regard it might have been the first time he had seen her—divined, as if the sun had possessed the power of X-rays, that she lacked education. Edward, whose success in life had been the success of his education, considered that he owed it to his cousin to remedy her deficiencies; keeping in view his principle of never offering to give something for nothing, he suggested that, in exchange for his teaching her Latin, she should teach him Italian. Jasmine would have willingly taught him Italian without the advantage of learning Latin; but she did not wish to appear ungracious, and the bargain was made. Edward advanced much more rapidly in Italian than she advanced in Latin, partly because he was better accustomed to study than she was, and partly because of the four hours a day they devoted to mutual instruction, three and a half hours were devoted to Italian and only half an hour to Latin. The result of this was that by the end of September he was reading Petrarch with fluency, while she had only reached the first conjugation of verbs and the second declension of nouns.
"You're very slow," Edward reproved her. "I can't understand why. It ought to be just as easy for you to learn Latin as it is for me to learn Italian. It's absolutely useless to go on to the third declension until you remember the genitive plural of dominus. Dominorum, not dominurum."
"I said dominorum."
"Yes, but you mustn't pronounce it like Italian."
"I'm not," Jasmine argued. "I think the trouble is that I've got a slight Neapolitan accent, and you think I'm saying urum when I'm really saying orum. You forget that I've got to unlearn my pronunciation to suit yours."
"Well, that applies equally to me," Edward argued.
The result of these difficulties was that Edward gave up trying to teach Jasmine Latin and confined himself entirely to learning Italian from her. About this time he read somewhere that the only way to master a language was to fall in love with somebody who speaks it. Such an observation struck him as a useful tip, in the same way as when he was at school he would remember the useful tip:
Tolle me, mi, mu, mis,
Si declinare domus vis.
He therefore proceeded to fall in love with Jasmine in the same earnest acquisitive way in which he would have proceeded to buy a highly recommended new type of notebook. Edward's notion of falling in love was that he should be able to introduce into an ordinary conversation phrases that otherwise and outside his study of Petrarch would have sounded extravagant. He made up his mind that if Jasmine showed the least sign of taking him seriously—and he realized that he had to bear in mind that cousins are marriageable—he would explain that it was merely practice. At the same time he found her personable, even charming, and if without involving himself or committing himself too far he could for the rest of the summer establish between himself and her a mildly sentimental relationship, which at the same time would be of great benefit to his Italian, he should be able to go up to Cambridge next term with the satisfactory thought that during the Long Vacation he had improved his French, strengthened his friendship with Lord Gresham, effected an excellent beginning with Italian, amused himself incidentally, and made sufficient progress with his reading for the first part of the Classical Tripos not to feel that he had neglected the main current of his academic career.