As it so happened, she glanced quite casually and innocently up into the eyes of Professor Flick. She caught his eye, in fact, right under the moony spectacles; and if those eyes under the moony spectacles did not understand Spanish, then Dolores had lost faith in her own bright eyes and her own very keen and lively perceptions.
But the moony spectacles were soon let down over the eyes of the Professor of Folk-Lore, and hung there like shutters or blinkers.
'No, madam,' spoke the Professor; 'I am sorry to say that I do not understand Spanish, for I presume you have been addressing me in Spanish,' he added hastily. 'It is a noble tongue, of course, but I have not had time to make myself acquainted with it.'
'I thought there was a great amount of folk-lore in Spanish,' the pertinacious Dolores went on.
'So there is, dear young lady, so there is. But one cannot know every language—one must have recourse to translations sometimes.'
'Could I help you,' she asked sweetly, 'with any work of translating from the Spanish? I should be delighted if I could—and I really do know Spanish pretty well.'
'Dear young lady, how kind that would be of you! And what a pleasure to me!'
'It would be both a pride and a pleasure to me to lend any helping hand towards the development of the study of folk-lore.'
The Professor looked at her in somewhat puzzled fashion, not through but from beneath the moony spectacles. Dolores felt perfectly satisfied that he was studying her. All the better reason, she thought, for her studying him.
What had Dolores got upon her mind? She did not know. She had not the least glimmering of a clear idea. It was not a very surprising thing that an American Professor addicted mainly to the study of folk-lore should not know Spanish. Dolores had a vague impression of having heard that, as a rule, Americans were not good linguists. But that was not what troubled and perplexed her. She felt convinced, in this case, that the professed American did understand Spanish, and that his ordinary accent had something Spanish in it, although he had declared that he had never been even in New Orleans.