"That is what everyone asks me, but I won't tell, no, I won't;" and she closed her mouth hard.
He, too, would have liked to hear the names, and he sighed, it must be admitted, at sight of that determined mouth, but he could say truthfully, "Your refusal to break your promise is one of the things that I admire in you." Admire! Grizel could scarce believe that this gift was for her.

"You don't mean that you really like me ?" she faltered, but she felt sure all the time that he did, and she cried, "Oh, but why, oh, how can you!" "For one reason," he said, "because you are so good." "Good! Oh! oh! oh!" She clapped her hands joyously.
"And for another--because you are so brave." "But I am not really brave," she said anxiously, yet resolved to hide nothing, "I only pretend to be brave, I am often frightened, but I just don't let on." That, he told her, is the highest form of bravery, but Grizel was very, very tired of being brave, and she insisted impetuously, "I don't want to be brave, I want to be afraid, like other girls." "Ay, it's your right, you little woman," he answered, tenderly, and then again he became mysterious.

He kicked off his shoes to show her that he was wearing socks that did not match.

"I just pull on the first that come to hand," he said recklessly.
"Oh!" cried Grizel.
On his dusty book-shelves he wrote, with his finger, "Not dusted since the year One." "Oh! oh!" she cried.
He put his fingers through his gray, untidy hair.

"That's the only comb I have that is at hand when I want it," he went on, regardless of her agony.
"All the stud-holes in my shirts," he said, "are now so frayed and large that the studs fall out, and I find them in my socks at night." Oh! oh! he was killing her, he was, but what cared he?
"Look at my clothes," said the cruel man, "I read when I'm eating, and I spill so much gravy that--that we boil my waistcoat once a month, and make soup of it!" To Grizel this was the most tragic picture ever drawn by man, and he saw that it was time to desist.