“If I was well educated, I should know how to help you,” she said, “but I've only been to a common Manchester school. I don't know anything about elegant language. What are these?” pointing to the blue-pencil marks.
Tembarom explained, and she studied the blue slashes with serious attention.
“Well,” she said in a few minutes, laying the manuscript down, “I should have cut those words out myself if—if you'd asked me which to take away. They're too showy, Mr. Tembarom.”
Tembarom whipped a pencil out of his pocket and held it out.
“Say,” he put it to her, “would you take this and draw it through a few of the other showy ones?”
“I should feel as if I was taking too much upon myself,” she said. “I don't know anything about it.”
“You know a darned sight more than I do,” Tembarom argued. “I didn't know they were showy. I thought they were the kind you had to put in newspaper stuff.”
She held the sheets of paper on her knee, and bent her head over them. Tembarom watched her dimples flash in and out as she worked away like a child correcting an exercise. Presently he saw she was quite absorbed. Sometimes she stopped and thought, pressing her lips together; sometimes she changed a letter. There was no lightness in her manner. A badly mutilated stocking would have claimed her attention in the same way.
“I think I'd put 'house' there instead of 'mansion' if I were you,” she suggested once.
“Put in a whole block of houses if you like,” he answered gratefully. “Whatever you say goes. I believe Galton would say the same thing.”