Clementina went about the whole day with the wonder what Gregory had said about Middlemount filling her mind.  It must have had something to do with her; he could not have forgotten the words he had asked her to forget.  She remembered them now with a curiosity, which had no rancor in it, to know why he really took them back.  She had never blamed him, and she had outlived the hurt she had felt at not hearing from him.  But she had never lost the hope of hearing from him, or rather the expectation, and now she found that she was eager for his message; she decided that it must be something like a message, although it could not be anything direct.  No one else had come to his place in her fancy, and she was willing to try what they would think of each other now, to measure her own obligation to the past by a knowledge of his.  There was scarcely more than this in her heart when she allowed herself to drift near Fane’s place that night, that he might speak to her, and tell her what Gregory had said.  But he had apparently forgotten about his letter, and only wished to talk about himself.  He wished to analyze himself, to tell her what sort of person he was.  He dealt impartially with the subject; he did not spare some faults of his; and after a week, he proposed a correspondence with her, in a letter of carefully studied spelling, as a means of mutual improvement as well as further acquaintance.

It cost Clementina a good deal of trouble to answer him as she wished and not hurt his feelings.  She declined in terms she thought so cold that they must offend him beyond the point of speaking to her again; but he sought her out, as soon after as he could, and thanked her for her kindness, and begged her pardon.  He said he knew that she was a very busy person, with all the lessons she was taking, and that she had no time for carrying on a correspondence.  He regretted that he could not write French, because then the correspondence would have been good practice for her.  Clementina had begun taking French lessons, of a teacher who came out from Boston.  She lunched three times a week with her and Mrs. Lander, and spoke the language with Clementina, whose accent she praised for its purity; purity of accent was characteristic of all this lady’s pupils; but what was really extraordinary in Mademoiselle Claxon was her sense of grammatical structure; she wrote the language even more perfectly than she spoke it; but beautifully, but wonderfully; her exercises were something marvellous.

Mrs. Lander would have liked Clementina to take all the lessons that she heard any of the other young ladies in the hotel were taking.  One of them went in town every day, and studied drawing at an art-school, and she wanted Clementina to do that, too.  But Clementina would not do that; she had tried often enough at home, when her brother Jim was drawing, and her father was designing the patterns of his woodwork; she knew that she never could do it, and the time