'Then you've really arranged it all, have you, Minna?' he asked wonderingly. You've really decided to go to Miss Woollacott's?'
Minna nodded.
'Well, Minna,' Colin said in a tone of genuine admiration, 'you may say what you like about us men being all the same (I suppose we are, if it comes to that), but I do admire you immensely for it. You've got such a wonderful lot of spirit and determination. Now, I know what you'll say; you'll go and take it wrong again; but, Minna, it's a great deal harder and more remarkable for a woman to try to raise herself than for a man to go and do it. Why, now I come to think of it, little woman, I've read of lots of men educating themselves and rising to be great people—George Stephenson, that made the steam-engines on railways, and Gibson the sculptor, and lots of painters and architects and people—but really and truly, I believe, Minna, I never read yet of a woman who'd been and done it.'
'That's because the books are all written by men, stupid, you may be certain,' Minna answered saucily. 'Anyhow, Colin, I'm going to try and do it. I'm going to leave my place at the end of the month, and go for a pupil-teacher at Miss Woollacott's. And I'm beginning the geography now, and the Second Grade English Grammar, so that I can get myself fit for it, Colin, a bit beforehand. I don't see why you should be reading all these fine books, you know, and I should be content with being no more nor a common parlourmaid.'
It was in the park, but it was getting dusky, and lovers in London are not so careful of secrecy as in the unsophisticated and less limited country. The great perennial epic of each human heart must needs work itself out somehow or other even under the Argus eyes of the big squalid ugly city. So Colin stooped down beneath the shade of the plane trees and kissed Minna twice or three times over in spite of her pretended struggling. (It is a point of etiquette with girls of Minna's class that they should pretend to struggle when one tries to kiss them.)
[Original]
'Minna,' he said earnestly, 'I'm proud of you. My dear little girl, I'm really proud of you.'
'What a funny thing it is,' thought Minna to herself, 'that he never makes love to me, though! I don't know even now whether he considers himself engaged to me or not.