She believed them all. The world that lay before her was irradiated by Tennyson and Bernard Shaw, by Georgian poetry and Michael Arlen, and, worse than all combined, by love.

But how, you will ask, had she gained so quickly this command of letters, and what did Mr. Fatigay think of it? She had gained it by sheer concentration, and Mr. Fatigay thought nothing of it at all, for, despite his monologues, he was completely unaware that his pet, or plaything, had understanding of any words beyond a few simply spoken commands.

Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse! thought Emily, with a momentary bitterness. But it was, she at once admitted to herself with all the warmth of generous self-reproof, largely by her own choice that he continued unmindful of her prowess. For on a day very shortly after her rebuff, and in the first impetuosity of her resolution to become worthy of his regard, she had tried to reveal her intelligence to her master in the classroom.

She had taken a place at an empty desk, instead of her usual one beside the master’s stool, and when the children saw her clutch pencil and paper in imitation of themselves, and glance eagerly upward to where Mr. Fatigay stood ready to inscribe model letters on the blackboard, they had cried out with delight. At which Mr. Fatigay had turned round, and, seeing what was afoot, he had said smiling:

“Come, come, Emily! If you are as clever as all that, you must be sold to perform on the halls.”

At once the frightened chimp had relinquished the implements of clerkiness, and crept trembling to her old place of subjection. How it all recurred to her when later on she read that Mrs. Virginia Woolf had been denied admittance to a university library! From that moment she gave no sign of possessing an intelligence higher than that with which she was naturally credited. To be debarred from doing so was very grievous to her, less on account of being denied the pleasures of innocent display, which interested her only so far as the impression she made on Mr. Fatigay was concerned, than because she was thus prevented from any opportunity of learning to write, for she could not partake unnoticed in the writing lessons as she could in those on reading. Afterwards she thought that perhaps all had been for the best, for, in her overwrought emotional state at this time, she might have been tempted to fritter away precious hours in the production of a sonnet sequence, to the detriment of her more instructive studies.

So she learned nothing but to read, but, since she was well able to concentrate, which the schoolchildren were not, she learned it at least a hundred times as fast as they. Before the six months had passed she was tolerably conversant with most of the books that a mild idealist takes to the jungle with him in these days, and on these, which help most of us to forget that we are human, she founded her innocent theory of what human life should be. Perhaps, in view of her sex, this was just as well.

There were, in this world she visualized, which must have somewhat resembled a stiff and formal Rousseau wedding group, over which some European tree alarms us by the painter’s memory of equatorial frondage, and in whose midst a small hairy nonhuman figure is set, smoldering destructively in its juxtaposition to these starchy nuptials; in this world there were certain elements which seemed alien and antagonistic to its central principle of domestic bliss. These were, to put it bluntly, women. The chief of them was that woman of thirty, on whom G. Moore delivers himself with all the gusto of an egoist and a bachelor. Reading his rhapsody, the chimp was impressed in spite of herself. She recognized the enemy of her faith and her hope, and she hated, yet admired. She toyed with the thought of making this creature her model, and shrank in innocent alarm from even the playful girlish whim. She was repelled, fascinated, and, on Mr. Fatigay’s account more than her own, she was filled with vague fears.

“Woman!” she thought, thinking of herself and the negresses, who were the only human kind she had seen, “Woman! The meek hairy shadow, or the glossy black caricature of man! Surely they must be of this second strutting kind who can be imagined as thinking and acting thus!” And, shaking her head, the perhaps old-fashioned chimp had replaced the disturbing volume on the shelf. But for some time this odalisque lay across her path, smiling.

Such forebodings, however, occupied only the more speculative of Emily’s reveries. Most of her time was filled, more happily, with the enlarging and remodeling of her conception of her beloved, for, as new ideas expanded the maiden demesne of her heart and mind, so the image of him who was destined lastingly to fill both grew within them, and was ever to be newly explored and additionally loved. That deeper and more workaday grain, which is to be won only by the recognition and cheerful acceptance of blemishes, now marked her feeling for him.

At first, as an apparition from another world, and unrelated to any background, he had possessed for her something of the flat and arbitrary luminosity of a saint in a stained-glass window. Now, seeing him more in the round, she was conscious of certain little weaknesses and blindnesses in him, such as are knit in the fiber of most of us, and while these made him less of the god to her, that earthiness made him more the man — one might say, the anthropoid — to be reached, to be loved possessively. She, who had longed to burn out her heart before him as one renders up the complimentary uselessness of incense to a deity placed high above needs and desires, was now possessed by a more practical tenderness, not less lofty for being practical, as it was not less becoming for being out of date: that is, to strengthen him against the world, to amuse him against himself, and to protect him against treacherous mischance. An opportunity soon came.

Emily was one day with her master in the little arbor which he had made at the end of the garden.