“I can't understand, indeed I can't,” said Molly, “why you're talking so!”
He seemed to have certain moods when he would address her as “ma'am,” and this she did not like, but could not prevent.
“Oh, a sick man is funny. And yu' know I'm grateful to you.”
“Please say no more about that, or I shall go this afternoon. I don't want to go. I am not ready. I think I had better read something now.”
“Why, yes. That's cert'nly a good notion. Why, this is the best show you'll ever get to give me education. Won't yu' please try that EMMA book now, ma'am? Listening to you will be different.” This was said with softness and humility.
Uncertain—as his gravity often left her—precisely what he meant by what he said, Molly proceeded with EMMA, slackly at first, but soon with the enthusiasm that Miss Austen invariably gave her. She held the volume and read away at it, commenting briefly, and then, finishing a chapter of the sprightly classic, found her pupil slumbering peacefully. There was no uncertainty about that.
“You couldn't be doing a healthier thing for him, deary,” said Mrs. Taylor. “If it gets to make him wakeful, try something harder.” This was the lady's scarcely sympathetic view.
But it turned out to be not obscurity in which Miss Austen sinned.
When Molly next appeared at the Virginian's threshold, he said plaintively, “I reckon I am a dunce.” And he sued for pardon. “When I waked up,” he said, “I was ashamed of myself for a plumb half-hour.” Nor could she doubt this day that he meant what he said. His mood was again serene and gentle, and without referring to his singular words that had distressed her, he made her feel his contrition, even in his silence.
“I am right glad you have come,” he said. And as he saw her going to the bookshelf, he continued, with diffidence: “As regyards that EMMA book, yu' see—yu' see, the doin's and sayin's of folks like them are above me. But I think” (he spoke most diffidently), “if yu' could read me something that was ABOUT something, I—I'd be liable to keep awake.” And he smiled with a certain shyness.