She had written _sweethearts_ at the first draft, but the word looked wrong somehow in a letter that was meant to be discouraging.
_I work quite hard at typewriting, and this is a very good machine. The only thing is that it won't do dipthongs, which is a pity, because Uncle Arnold gets very angry if Saxon names are not spelt with dipthongs. There are six cousins here who are called after the six boy kings. Uncle Arnold calls them Eadward, Eadmund, Eadgar, Eadwig, Ædred and Æthelred; but other people call them Eddy, Monday, Tuesday, Why, Because, and Ethel. Edward, who is the eldest, I haven't seen yet. He is at Cambridge. I hope you are enjoying yourself wherever you are, and that you haven't been taking any more people's walking-sticks!_
_P.S. I think it would be better if you didn't come down here and try to see me._
Jasmine was very proud of this postscript; it did not strike her that the bee's sting is in its tail. She would have been astonished if anybody had told her that it was unkind to end up with such an afterthought, did she seriously mean to forbid Harry Vibart to see her again. And she would have been still more astonished and a good deal horrified if anybody had suggested that the prohibition put like that might actually have the air of an invitation, should the recipient of the letter choose to regard it cynically.
However, she did not receive so much as a bare acknowledgment of her letter, and she convinced herself, perhaps a little regretfully, that Harry Vibart, offended by her request, had decided not to bother any more about her.
Meanwhile Edward had arrived. Edward was one of those young men of whom it can be postulated immediately that he could never have been called anything else except Edward. He was a tall and awkward, an extremely industrious, a clever and an immensely conceited young man, who hid the natural gloom established by years of nervous dyspepsia, or more bluntly by chronic indigestion, under a pretentious solemnity of manner. His arrival at Silchester coincided with a change of weather, and the rainy days that attended in his wake created in Jasmine's mind an impression that he was even more of a wet blanket than she might otherwise have thought. For the first few days he hung about the rooms like a low cloud, telling long stories about his tour in Brittany with Lord Gresham, stories that for the most part were about taking the wrong road and putting up at the wrong inn. When he had bored his family so successfully that every member of it had reached the point of regarding life from the standpoint of a nervous dyspeptic, he grew more cheerful and aired his latest discoveries in modern literature. Then he decided to keep a journal, with the intention, it was understood, of immortalizing his spleen. Like most people who keep journals, he was usually a day or two in arrears, and when people saw him pompously entering the room with a notebook under his arm, they used to hasten anywhere to escape being asked what he had done on Thursday morning between eleven and one. At last the sun appeared again, and Edward, looking at Jasmine--by the intensity of his regard it might have been the first time he had seen her--divined, as if the sun had possessed the power of X-rays, that she lacked education. Edward, whose success in life had been the success of his education, considered that he owed it to his cousin to remedy her deficiencies; keeping in view his principle of never offering to give something for nothing, he suggested that, in exchange for his teaching her Latin, she should teach him Italian. Jasmine would have willingly taught him Italian without the advantage of learning Latin; but she did not wish to appear ungracious, and the bargain was made. Edward advanced much more rapidly in Italian than she advanced in Latin, partly because he was better accustomed to study than she was, and partly because of the four hours a day they devoted to mutual instruction, three and a half hours were devoted to Italian and only half an hour to Latin. The result of this was that by the end of September he was reading Petrarch with fluency, while she had only reached the first conjugation of verbs and the second declension of nouns.