Strange, because it was more than the ordinary admiration which a young man feels for a beautiful girl. Now that he saw more of her he felt drawn by a sort of magnetic attraction in her sparkling eyes, something which made him inquisitive to read into the depths of that bright young soul, something that told him, much more plainly than did her words, that she was no ordinary pretty girl, but that she had a nature which could feel and a head which could think.
“Oh, I didn’t mean that!” she replied, laughing again. “But when a man talks of novels there is always a suggestion in his words that they are beneath him, at all events.”
“I am not in a position to say that they’re beneath me,” said Bayre. “I want to write them. Indeed, if the truth were told—”
“You’ve written one already? Well, so have I!”
“Ah!”
There was a certain inevitable tone of indulgence in this exclamation which made the girl redden.
“Why do you say ‘Ah!’ like that?”
“Did I say it offensively?” said Bayre, smiling at last.
“I won’t go so far as to say that; but you said it in a tone which implied—well, I think it implied that you could not expect much from my performance.”
“If my tone said all that I apologise humbly. And yet, no, on second thoughts I don’t apologise. For after all, what could there be in a novel by a young girl just out of school, who knows nothing whatever of life beyond the four walls of her schoolroom?”