Ann had not mentioned the fact that she spent most of her rare leisure moments in profound study of phrase-books and grammars, which she kept in her trunk and gave her attention to before she got up in the morning, after she went to her room at night, and usually while she was dressing. You can keep a book open before you when you are brushing your hair. Dudevant gave her a lesson or so whenever time allowed. She was as quick to learn as her father thought he was, and she was desperately determined. It was really not long before she understood much more than “wee and nong” when she was present at a business interview.
“You are a wonderful young lady,” Dudevant said, with that well-known yearning in his eyes. “You are most wonderful.”
“She's just a wonder,” Mrs. Bowse and her boarders had said. And the respectful yearning in the young Frenchman's eyes and voice were well known to her because she had seen it often before, and remembered it, in Jem Bowles and Julius Steinberger. That this young man had without an hour of delay fallen abjectly in love with her was a circumstance with which she dealt after her own inimitably kind and undeleterious method, which in itself was an education to any amorous youth.
“I can understand all you tell me,” she said when he reached the point of confiding his hard past to her. “I can understand it because I knew some one who had to fight for himself just that way, only perhaps it was harder because he wasn't educated as you are.”
“Did he—confide in you?” Dudevant ventured, with delicate hesitation. “You are so kind I am sure he did, Mademoiselle.”
“He told me about it because he knew I wanted to hear,” she answered. “I was very fond of him,” she added, and her kind gravity was quite unshaded by any embarrassment. “I was right-down fond of him.”
His emotion rendered him for a moment indiscreet, to her immediate realization and regret, as was evident by his breaking off in the midst of his question.
“And now—are you?”
“Yes, I always shall be, Mr. Dudevant.”
His adoration naturally only deepened itself as all hope at once receded, as it could not but recede before the absolute pellucid truth of her.