“I don’t like it! I don’t like it! I don’t like it at all!”
In a moment or two they were caricaturing the neighborhood and making guesses as to the portrait.
He didn’t say, “That isn’t fair,” or “You shouldn’t mimic your elders that way”; nor did he begin any sentence with, “It isn’t nice for young girls to—” Instead, he joined in, became particeps criminis, and at once was initiated into the secretest of fraternities, the brotherhood of children. In a little while he had won the right to ask her any personal question he wished without once being suspected of school-teachering.
He wanted to know what she was reading.
“‘Man and Wife,’” she told him.
Wilkie Collins wrote it, and Professor Blynn did not know that! It was about a Scotch marriage, she explained: two persons had unwittingly acknowledged themselves man and wife before witnesses; that was enough to bind them in irrevocable marriage.
Her explanations were clear—evidently she knew what she was reading—and she talked of marriage and children with extraordinary frankness.
“At the same time I am reading ‘La Peau de Chagrin’ par Honoré Balzac,” this with a breathless kind of mystery.
The change of timbre as the French name floated out musically brought Blynn to sudden attention.
“You speak French?” he inquired incredulously. He knew that she had never gone to school, and that among Mount Airy families it was not then customary to have governesses.