Every now and then, indeed, as their talk flowed on, he noticed in what she said an absence of a good many interests and attainments which in his ordinary south-country women friends he would have assumed as a matter of course.
'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.