The first evening they began with Gray's “Elegy,” and Miss Alicia felt that it did not exhilarate him; she was also obliged to admit that he did not read it very well. But she felt sure he would improve. Personally she was touchingly happy. The sweetly domestic picture of the situation, she sitting by the fire with her knitting and he reading aloud, moved and delighted her. The next evening she suggested Tennyson's “Maud.” He was not as much stirred by it as she had hoped. He took a somewhat humorous view of it.
“He had it pretty bad, hadn't he?”' he said of the desperate lover.
“Oh, if only you could once have heard Sims Reeves sing 'Come into the Garden, Maud'!” she sighed. “A kind friend once took me to hear him, and I have never, never forgotten it.”
But Mr. Temple Barholm notably did not belong to the atmosphere of impassioned tenors.
On still another evening they tried Shakspere. Miss Alicia felt that a foundation of Shakspere would be “improving” indeed. They began with “Hamlet.”
He found play-reading difficult and Shaksperian language baffling, but he made his way with determination until he reached a point where he suddenly grew quite red and stopped.
“Say, have you read this?” he inquired after his hesitation.
“The plays of Shakspere are a part of every young lady's education,” she answered; “but I am afraid I am not at all a Shaksperian scholar.”
“A young lady's education?” he repeated. “Gee whizz!” he added softly after a pause.
He glanced over a page or so hastily, and then laid the book down.