"I'll teach you any way you like, Floss, on any system; if you'll only explain what you want. What's your idea?"
"My idea's this. How would it be if you and me were to write French letters to each other?"
"Rather! The Beaver's intelligence is going to its head. That's the way to learn, Floss; you'll get over the ground like winking. But you know—I shall have to raise my terms."
"All right. We'll see about that."
He was delighted with her idea. That Flossie should have an idea at all was something so deliciously new and surprising; and what could be more heartrending than these prodigious intellectual efforts, her evident fear that her limitations constituted a barrier between them? As if it mattered! As if he wanted a literary critic for his wife. And how brutally he had criticized her—as if it mattered! Still, in spite of his compunction, the French lessons were not altogether a success. There was too much disagreement and discussion about terms; for the master became more and more exorbitant in his charges as the days went on, and the pupil still complained that she was learning nothing. She was thoroughly dissatisfied with his method. He would break off at the most interesting, the most instructive point, and let loose his imagination in all sorts of ridiculous histories that followed from the idea of her being a Beaver; and when she desired him to tell her such simple things as the French for "Your esteemed favour to hand," "Cheque enclosed," "We have forwarded to you to-day as per invoice," he wanted to know what on earth a beaver had to do with invoices.
It was Spinks who explained the nature of the connection.
Poor Spinks, who had made the suggestion with an almost suicidally honourable intention, was to his immense astonishment merely sworn at for his interference. And when Flossie brought Keith his tea that evening she found him in a most ungentlemanly humour.
She waited demurely for a pause in the storm that raged round Spinks and his confounded wine-merchant. She cast a significant glance at the table strewn at that moment with the rough draft of Rickman's tragedy. (Flossie couldn't understand why he could never write a thing out clearly from the first, nor why she shouldn't write it for him at his dictation.)
"It's all very well, Keith," said she, "but if you can't do more, I must."
Before she left the room it was understood between them that Flossie would renounce her wine-merchant, and that they would be married, if possible, some time in the autumn. He felt curiously shaken by that interview.