"Rubbish! No woman can be a cosmopolitan." He said it in the same tone in which he had told Frida that no woman could have a pure passion for Nature. "And Miss Tancred, though nice, strikes me as peculiarly provincial. I shouldn't have thought——"
"There are things in her you'd never have thought of. It's wonderful how she comes out when you know her."
"She certainly has come out wonderfully since you came on the scene." (The words he used had a familiar ring. It was exactly what Mrs. Fazakerly had said to him.)
"I? I've not had anything to do with it. It was you; she told me. It wasn't just that you understood her; you made her understand herself; you made her feel; you stirred up all the passion in her."
"I don't understand you," he said coldly.
"Well, I think if you can understand Miss Tancred you might understand me. Compared with Frida I'm simplicity itself."
"When did I do these things?"
"Why, when you told her to let herself go. When you showed her your sketches and talked to her about the places, and the sea, all the things you had seen; the things she had dreamed of and never seen."
The young girl spoke as if she was indignant with him for reveling in opportunities that were Frida's by right.
"But she shall see them. She shall go away from this, and be herself and nobody else in the world."