"'All work and no play,'" begins Perpetua, and stops, and shakes her charming head at him. "You will be a dull boy if you don't take care," says she.
A ghost of a little smile warms her sad lips as she says this, and lights up her shining eyes like a ray of sunlight. Then it fades, and she grows sorrowful again.
"Well, I can't study," says she.
"Why not?" demands the professor quickly. Here he is on his own ground; and here he has a pupil to his hand—a strange, an enigmatical, but a lovely one. "Believe me knowledge is the one good thing that life contains worth having. Pleasures, riches, rank, all sink to insignificance beside it."
"How do you know?" says she. "You haven't tried the others."
"I know it, for all that. I feel it. Get knowledge—such knowledge as the short span of life allotted to us will allow you to get. I can lend you some books, easy ones at first, and——"
"I couldn't read your books," says she; "and—you haven't any novels, I suppose?"
"No," says he. "But——"
"I don't care for any books but novels," says she, sighing. "Have you read 'Alas?' I never have anything to read here, because Aunt Jane says novels are of the devil, and that if I read them I shall go to hell."
"Nonsense!" says the professor gruffly.