g 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 an