elegant! The girl taught him it without a trace of grammar, by
charm, sprightliness, a little nonsense; a pair of confiding eyes
and a youthful voice were sufficient. It was from her that he got,
by stealth, one novel after another. By stealth it had to be; by
stealth Lucie had procured them; by stealth she gave them to him;
by stealth they were read; by stealth she took them back again.
This reading made him a little absent-minded, but otherwise
nothing betrayed his flights into literature: to be sure, they
were not very wonderful.

Fru Kaas noticed her son's flirtation, and smiled with the rest
over his progress in French. She had less objection to this
friendship, in which, to a great extent, she shared, than to those
in England, from which she had been quite excluded. In the
evenings she would take the mother and daughter out for short
excursions; and these she greatly enjoyed. But the novel reading
which the young people carried on secretly had resulted in
conversations of a "grown up" type. They talked of love with the
deep experience which is proper to their age, they talked with
still greater discretion as to when their wedding should take
place; on this point they indirectly said much which caused them
many a delightful tremor. As they were accustomed to talk about
themselves before others, to describe their feelings in a veiled
form, it often happened when there were many people near that they
carried this amusement further, and before they were themselves
aware of it, they were in the full tide of a symbolic language and
played "catch" with each other.

Fru Kaas noticed one evening that the word "rose" was drawn out to
a greater length than it was possible for any rose to attain to;