"Is that a challenge? Will you take me under the limes?" "No, indeed! I do not admit men who despise them to my gardens of Armida, any more than you would admit me into your Schools. I have as great a scorn for a skeptic as you have for a tyro." "Pardon me. I have no scorn for a tyro. But you would not come to the Accademe; you dislike 'Plato' too much." Fay looked up at him half shyly, half mischievously. "Yes, I do dislike you, when you look down on me as Richelieu might have looked down on his kitten." "Liking to see its play?" said Keane, half sadly. "Contrasting its gay insouciance with his own toil and turmoil, regretting, perhaps, the time when trifles made his joy as they did his kitten's? If I were to look on you so, there would not be much to offend you." "You do not think so of me, or you would speak to me as if I were an intelligent being, not a silly little thing." "How do you know I think you silly?" "Because you think all women so." "Perhaps; but then you should rather try to redeem me from my error in doctrine. Come, let us sign a treaty of peace. Take me under the limes. I want some fresh air after writing all day; and in payment I will teach you Euclid, as you vainly beseeched your cousin to do yesterday." "Will you?" cried Fay, eagerly. Then she threw back her head. "I never am won by bribes." "Nor yet by threats? What a difficult young lady you are. Come, show me your shrubbery sanctum now you have invaded mine." The English rosebud laid aside its wilful thorns, and Fay, a little less afraid of her Plato, and therefore a little less defiant to him, led him over the grounds, filled his hands with flowers, showed him her aviary, read some of Jocelyn to him, to show him, she said, that Lamartine was better than the Oedipus in Coloneus, and thought, as she dressed for dinner, "I wonder if he does despise me--he has such a beautiful face, if he were not so haughty and cold!" The next day Keane gave her an hour of Euclid in the study. Certainly The Coach had never had such a pretty pupil; and he wished every dull head he had to cram was as intelligent as this fair-haired one. Fay was quick and clever; she was stimulated, moreover, by his decree concerning the stupidity of all women; she really worked as hard as any young man studying for degrees when they supposed her fast asleep in bed, and she got over the Pons Asinorum in a style that fairly astonished her tutor. The Coach did not dislike his occupation either; it did him good, after his life of solitude and study, something as the kitten and cork did Richelieu good after his cabinets and councils; and Little Fay, with her flowers and fun, mischief and impudence, and that winning wilfulness which it amused him gradually to tame down, unbent the chillness which had grown upon him. He was the better for it, as a man after hard study or practice is the better for some fresh sea-breezes, and some days of careless dolce.