“I’m trying to think what my father would say.”
Bridget’s face darkened; she began to fidget impatiently with the paper in front of her; but Helen was looking at the sunlit leaves.
“I think he would say the style was bad,—might be improved,” she said, unconsciously substituting a phrase of the professor’s for her own.
“Style?” Bridget repeated. “What do you mean? What is style?”
“I don’t know quite; it’s difficult to explain. Father would tell you. It’s a way of saying things, I think.”
“But you said I had made them real people!” Bridget protested.
“So you have.”
“Well! what does it matter how I put the words, as long as I’ve done that?”
“I don’t know, but it does. Father says it is very important. Cultivated people—”
“But I’m not a cultivated person, you see!” Bridget returned fiercely, her face flushing. “I don’t belong to cultivated people, and I don’t know how to finick, and be mincing, and awfully refined in writing, any more than in talking. If that’s what style means, I’d rather be without it, and say straight out what I mean, and what I see. I should hate to be such a young lady”—there was an accent of fierce contempt in the words—“as—as—”