“If it is anything to do with—that is I mean to say—I will pay in advance,” he blurted out.
The girl bit her lip.
“It has nothing to do with that,” she cried sharply. “Oh, dear me, how very dense you are! Don’t you see that it wouldn’t do for me to teach you?”
He stared at her.
“Good heavens!” he exclaimed, “you don’t mean to say that you’re afraid of Mrs Grundy? She would never get up those stairs I can assure you, and if she did why we’d stick her on the model throne and paint her.”
Jill laughed in spite of herself. It sounded very ridiculous put into plain English, and yet after all he had pretty well hit upon the truth.
“It isn’t only Mrs Grundy,” she replied, “but I—I don’t feel equal to undertaking you. I think it would be better if you went to someone—older.”
“When I read your advertisement,” he said stiffly, “I imagined that you would be older. But I don’t see that it much matters. I want to study art. You wish to teach it and have no other pupils. Why not try me for a quarter and see how it works?”
It was a great temptation, Jill still hesitated. Absurd as she felt it to be she was unmistakably nervous at the thought of teaching this big young man, while he, noting her indecision, stood waiting anxiously for her to speak, too engrossed with his project to consider her at all; she merely represented a means to an end, the object through which he might accomplish the only real ambition of his life.
“I don’t know,” she said slowly after a long pause, “I think perhaps I might try as you suggest, for the quarter but—I wish you had been a girl.”