'Oh! I am just a dunce,' she said one day to Eleanor, with a smile and sigh, after some questions as to her childhood and bringing up. 'They ought to have sent me to college. All the girls I knew went. But then Uncle Ben would have been quite alone. So I just had to get along.'
'But you know what many girls don't know.'
Lucy gave a shrug.
'I know some Latin and Greek, and other things that Uncle Ben could teach me. But oh! what a simpleton I used to feel in Boston!'
'You were behind the age?
Lucy laughed.
'I didn't seem to have anything to do with the age, or the age with me. You see, I was slow, and everybody else was quick. But an American that isn't quick's got no right to exist. You're bound to have heard the last thing, and read the last book, or people just want to know why you're there!'
'Why should people call you slow?' said Eleanor, in that voice which Lucy often found so difficult to understand, because of the strange note of hostility which, for no reason at all, would sometimes penetrate through the sweetness. 'It's absurd. How quickly you've picked up Italian—and frocks!—and a hundred things.'
She smiled, and stroked the brown head beside her.
Lucy coloured, bent over her work, and did not reply.