'I understand French very little, and I never read any,' she said
to him once, quietly, as he fell to comparing some peasant story
she had told him with an episode in one of George Sand's Berry
novels. It seemed to him that she knew her Wordsworth by heart.
And her own mountain life, her own rich and meditative soul, had
taught her judgments and comments on her favorite poet which stirred
Elsmere every now and then to enthusiasm--so true they were and
pregnant, so full often of a natural magic of expression. On the
other hand, when he quoted a very well-known line of Shelley's she
asked him where it came from. She seemed to him deeper and simpler
at every moment; her very limitations of sympathy and knowledge,
and they were evidently many, began to attract him. The thought
of her ancestry crossed him now and then, rousing in him now wonder,
and now a strange sense of congruity and harmony. Clearly she was
the daughter of a primitive unexhausted race. And yet what purity,
what refinement, what delicate perception and self-restraint!

Presently they fell on the subject of Oxford.

'Were you ever there?' he asked her.

'Once,' she said. 'I went with my father one summer term. I have
only, a confused memory of it--of the quadrangles, and a long street,
a great building with a dome, and such beautiful trees!'

'Did your father often go back?'

'No; never toward the later part of his life'--and her clear eyes
clouded a little, 'nothing made him so sad as the thought of Oxford.'