“You must let me correct your English today,” she said, busily taking him with her voice by the hand in a forward rush into the empty hour that was to test, perhaps to destroy the achievement of their first meeting. “Just now you said ‘the subjects we have discussed yesterday.’ ‘Have’ is the indefinite past; ‘yesterday,’ as you used it, is a definite point of time; passé défini , we discussed yesterday. We have always discussed these things on Thursdays. We always discussed these things on Thursdays. Those two phrases have different meanings. The first indefinite because it suggests the discussions still going on, the second definite referring to a fixed period of past time.”
She had made her speech at the table and glanced up at him apologetically. Marvelling at her unexpected knowledge of the grammar of her own tongue, called into being she supposed by the jar of his inaccuracy, she had for a moment almost forgotten his presence.
“I perceive,” he said shifting his chin on his hand to face her fully, with bent head and moving beard-point; his voice came again as strange, from an immense distance; he was there like a ghost; “that you are in spite of your denials a most excellent institutrice. Ach-ma! My English is bad. You shall explain me all these complications of English verb-mixing; but tonight I am reeally too stupid.”
“It is all quite easy; it only appears to be difficult.”
“It shall be easy; you have, I remark, a more clear pure English than I have met; and I am very intelligent. It shall not be difficult.”
Miriam hid her laughter by gathering up one of his books with a random question. But how brave. Why should not people admit intelligence? … It was a sort of pamphlet, in French.
“Ah, that is most interesting; you shall at once read it. He is a most intelligent man. I have hear this lectchoor—”