“Indeed!” said Charlotte coldly.
“It is the last phrase that is so particularly worrying, is it not?—of course it is made to be so. Many French girls themselves would not know how to put it perfectly.”
Now it was this last phrase that to Charlotte had been a veritable ass’s bridge. And besides her ambition, she had the purer motive of a student’s real interest in thoroughly comprehending the working of the rule. As Claudia spoke she half unconsciously relaxed a little in her stiff, stand-off manner.
“Yes,” she said more frankly, “it is the last part that I cannot satisfy myself about.”
“Would you let me?—oh, please do,” said Claudia, her face flushing, her voice literally trembling with eagerness. “Might I just explain to you how I have said it to myself?” and without waiting for Charlotte’s half-hesitating reply, she ran on. In a few clear, terse sentences she put it before her listener, as all mademoiselle’s long explanations or the involved language of the grammar had failed to do. Charlotte forgot herself and her prejudices in real admiration and satisfaction.
“I see,” she exclaimed delightedly. “Miss Meredon, you have a real genius for teaching.”
“Do you really think so?” Claudia replied joyously. “And you are such a good judge. Oh, if you only—” but she checked herself sharply. “You do work so well and so hard, Miss Waldron.”
“Yes,” said Charlotte, with a slight return of the cold moodiness which Claudia had rarely seen behind, “I don’t spare myself. I care for nothing on earth so much as for getting on well with my lessons.”
There was an intensity in her tone which almost startled Claudia. At the same time it touched a sympathetic chord.
“Oh, do you really feel so?” she exclaimed impulsively. “I think I can understand it. You have probably some very great motive as well as love of learning. Are you perhaps looking forward to making some use of your education, of all you are learning, before long—to help your parents, perhaps?” Charlotte grew crimson.