She opened her brown eyes wide. "Why do you waste your abilities and college education?" she asked him naïvely—"not that everybody calls it a waste; some people say 'Robinson's' is the high-class shop it is, because its masters have not only been respectable people, they have always been educated men and gentlemen."
"I ought to say for myself and my predecessors that I am much obliged to 'some people' for acknowledging that," he remarked coolly.
"I beg your pardon, Mr. Robinson," said May humbly. "I know I have been very rude—I am constantly saying stupid things."
"Not at all; and though you did, never mind—say them to me if you like," he gave her carte blanche to comfort her. "But look here, Miss May, I don't wish you to make mistakes. Indeed it is my duty, since I am a great deal older than you—old enough to be, well, your uncle I should say—to prevent it if I can."
"I don't see how you could be my uncle," said May bluntly, "when you are not more than five or six years older than Annie—I have heard her say so—you are more like my brother."
The instant she mentioned the relationship to which he had aspired in vain, she felt the blood tingling to her finger-tips, and she could see him redden under the shade of his soft felt hat.
May groaned inwardly. "Oh! I am a blundering goose; I wonder anybody can be so infatuated as to think me clever."
"I have not said what I wished to say," he resumed, for somehow, in spite of her forgetfulness and lack of tact, he could talk well enough to May. "I must set you right. I have not a grain of the scholar in me such as you have, neither do I believe that those who went before me had; we could never have been more than fair students. We did not go out of our way to get learning. We did what our associates and contemporaries did, that was all. I fancy I may take the small credit to us of saying that we had no objection to learn what the ancients thought, saw, and did, after we had been lugged through the Latin grammar and caned into familiarity with Greek verbs. We were like other men who had the same advantages. I honestly believe if we had anything special and individual about us it was a turn for trade. That is the only manner in which I can account for our sticking to the shop, unless we were mere money-grubbers. But all that signifies very little; what does signify is that you are not quite like other girls. What, May, do you pretend that you do not prize the roll of a sonorous passage, or the trip of an exquisite phrase in Latin or Greek? That it does not tickle your ears, cling to your memory, and haunt you as a theme in music haunts a composer? Do you not care to go any deeper in Plato or in the dramatists? Is it a fact that you can bear to have heard the last of Antigone, and Alcestis, and Electra?"
May hung her head like one accused of gross unfaithfulness, with some show of reason.
"No, I cannot say that, Mr. Robinson," she owned, "I shall think and dream of them all my life. They are so grand and persecuted and sad. But there—if I do not turn my back on them and my books, I must go to St. Ambrose's, there is no choice," ended May disconsolately.