“You could not possibly have a better book for style and phraseology in English, quite apart from the meaning.”
“No,” he said, with reproachful gravity, “preciosity I cannot have.”
Miriam felt out of her depth. “Perhaps you won’t like Emerson,” she said, “but it will be good practice for you. You need not attend to the meaning.”
“Well, ach-ma, we shall try, but not this evanink; I have headache, we shall rather talk; let us return to the soobjects we have discussed yesterday.” He rested his elbows on the table, supporting his chin on one hand, his beard askew, one eye reduced to a slit by the bulge of his pushed up cheek, his whole face suddenly pallid and heavy, sleepy-looking.
“I am most-interested in philosophy,” he said, glowering warmly through his further, wide-open eye. “It was very good to me. I found myself most excited after our talk of yesterday. I think you too were interested?”
“Yes, wasn’t it extraordinary?” Miriam paused to choose between the desire to confess her dread of confronting a full-fledged student and a silence that would let him go on talking while she contemplated a series of reflections extending forward out of sight from his surprising admission of fellowship. It was so strange, an exhilaration so deep and throwing such wide thought-inviting illumination, to discover that he had found yesterday exceptional; that he too, with all his wonderful life, found interest scattered only here and there. Meanwhile his eagerness to rekindle without fresh fuel, the glow of yesterday, confessed an immaturity that filled her with a tumult of astonished solicitude.
“You must let me correct your English to-day,” she said, busily taking him with her voice by the hand in a forward rush into the empty hour that was to test, perhaps to destroy the achievement of their first meeting. “Just now you said ‘the subjects we have discussed yesterday.’ ‘Have’ is the indefinite past; ‘yesterday,’ as you used it, is a definite point of time; passé défini, we discussed yesterday. We have always discussed these things on Thursdays. We always discussed these things on Thursdays. Those two phrases have different meanings. The first indefinite because it suggests the discussions still going on, the second definite referring to a fixed period of past time.”
She had made her speech at the table and glanced up at him apologetically. Marvelling at her unexpected knowledge of the grammar of her own tongue, called into being she supposed by the jar of his inaccuracy, she had for a moment almost forgotten his presence.
“I perceive,” he said shifting his chin on his hand to face her fully, with bent head and moving beard-point; his voice came again as strange, from an immense distance; he was there like a ghost; “that you are in spite of your denials a most excellent institutrice. Ach-ma! My English is bad. You shall explain me all these complications of English verb-mixing; but to-night I am reeally too stupid.”
“It is all quite easy; it only appears to be difficult.”