He was deeply annoyed at his lack of fluency, but Ida once more was deliberately “upsetting” him. She smiled indulgently.
“I guess I like your new-fangled notions. I’ll write all that down while you’re thinkin’ up what to say next.”
She leaned over the table and wrote slowly that he might have leisure to admire her figure in profile. But he gazed sternly out of the window until she swayed back to the perpendicular and demanded,
“What next? Do you want me to say băth and căn’t?”
“Oh, no, I really shouldn’t advise it, not in Butte. I don’t wish to teach you anything that will add to the discomforts of life—so long as your lines are cast here. Just modify the lamentably short American a a bit.” And he rehearsed her for a few moments.
“Fine. I’ll try it on Greg—Mr. Compton. If he laughs I’ll know I’m too good, but if he only puckers his eyebrows and looks as if somethin’ queer was floatin’ round just out of sight, then I’ll know I’ve struck the happy medium. I’ll be a real high-brow in less than no time.”
“You certainly are surprisingly quick,” said Professor Whalen handsomely. “In a year I could equip you for our centres of culture, but as I remarked just now it would not be kind to transform you into an exotic. Now, suppose we read a few pages of this grammar——”
“I studied grammar at school,” interrupted Ida haughtily. “What do you take Butte for, anyhow. It may be a mining camp, and jay enough compared with your old Boston, but I guess we learn something mor’n the alphabet at all these big red brick schoolhouses we’ve got—Montana’s famous for its grand schoolhouses——”
“Yes, yes, my dear Mrs. Compton. But, you know, one forgets so quickly. And then so many of you don’t stay in school long enough. How old were you when you left?”
“Fifteen. Ma wouldn’t let me go to the High.”