"Then he will probably send you to school in the autumn."
This also was a new idea, but after consideration she dismissed it. "No.... I didn't study very well when Aunt Sue sent me to school," she added with a touch of shame.
"You didn't?" Edward was genuinely surprised; it was not his reading of her.
"I couldn't ever learn arithmetic—I tried hard, but I couldn't. The teacher told Aunt Sue that I had no brains for study, an' she took me away from school." Ann hated to make the admission, she had been led into it before she knew, and added quickly, "But I liked history and composition—I like to read. I've read my father's books through and through."
"They don't know what good brains are in that school in the village," Edward said quietly. "My greatest pleasure is reading, too—you are fortunate to have grown up in a library."
Ann was forced to admit that it was not a library, just a cupboard in her father's room stacked with books. Edward knew that, as a boy, Coats Penniman had been an omnivorous reader and something of a student. He selected in his mind the books Coats was likely to have read, many histories, the lives of great men, and the staider fiction which he himself had enjoyed when a boy, and Ann warmed into vivid pleasure when she found that they had acquaintances in common. She talked of George Eliot's characters as one would of friends, and lovingly of Maggie Tulliver, that creation of a great woman's brain always tenderly loved by misfits such as Ann.
"She was a nobody's child," Ann said softly.
Edward noticed that the dramatic and emotional appealed profoundly to her, and the sentimental very little. He thought as he listened to her and looked at her beauty that, if the right sort of man possessed her, she would grow into a superb woman; a few years' training would make her a finished product, something more than presentable, a really fascinating woman. But the emotional in her would have to be satisfied. It was innate, patent, unmistakable—her power to arouse passion, an irresistible inclination to test the emotional, and it was quite possible that in the process she might be irremediably marred.
Edward thought of the thing he had witnessed the morning before, his brother's face bent to Ann's, and his own face darkened. He had thought of it frequently in the last twenty-four hours, and with a full realization of what her appeal to Garvin would be. He thought of the night just past, when the family skeleton had broken loose and been captured and locked away again, only after hours of dread and terror to them all.
He turned from the sickening recollection to look again at Ann. He reflected that with her type the brain is apt to be constant and the emotions less dependable, and love, actual love, rarely a sudden thing and almost always a consecration. How much of herself she would give would depend largely on the man who captured her; to hold her he would have to appeal to her brain as well as her emotions. Edward was certain that he read her aright. He had traveled a long way before he had learned what little he knew of women; what man ever knew more than a very little of the riddle the Creator intended man should not solve.