“That’s pretty clear,” he said.  “I never thought of it before.  But it don’t mean they must have helped somebody, does it?  Seems to me that ‘never helped nobody’ just naturally fails to say whether or not they helped somebody.  I never thought of it before, and I’ll never say it again.”

She was pleased and surprised with the quickness and surety of his mind.  As soon as he had got the clew he not only understood but corrected her error.

“You’ll find it all in the grammar,” she went on.  “There’s something else I noticed in your speech.  You say ‘don’t’ when you shouldn’t.  ‘Don’t’ is a contraction and stands for two words.  Do you know them?”

He thought a moment, then answered, “‘Do not.’”

She nodded her head, and said, “And you use ‘don’t’ when you mean ’does not.’”

He was puzzled over this, and did not get it so quickly.

“Give me an illustration,” he asked.

“Well—­” She puckered her brows and pursed up her mouth as she thought, while he looked on and decided that her expression was most adorable.  “‘It don’t do to be hasty.’  Change ‘don’t’ to ‘do not,’ and it reads, ‘It do not do to be hasty,’ which is perfectly absurd.”

He turned it over in his mind and considered.

“Doesn’t it jar on your ear?” she suggested.

“Can’t say that it does,” he replied judicially.

“Why didn’t you say, ’Can’t say that it do’?” she queried.

“That sounds wrong,” he said slowly.  “As for the other I can’t make up my mind.  I guess my ear ain’t had the trainin’ yours has.”

“There is no such word as ‘ain’t,’” she said, prettily emphatic.

Martin flushed again.

“And you say ‘ben’ for ‘been,’” she continued; “‘come’ for ‘came’; and the way you chop your endings is something dreadful.”

“How do you mean?” He leaned forward, feeling that he ought to get down on his knees before so marvellous a mind.  “How do I chop?”

“You don’t complete the endings.  ‘A-n-d’ spells ‘and.’  You pronounce it ‘an’.’  ‘I-n-g’ spells ‘ing.’  Sometimes you pronounce it ‘ing’ and sometimes you leave off the ‘g.’  And then you slur by dropping initial letters and diphthongs.  ‘T-h-e-m’ spells ‘them.’  You pronounce it—­oh, well, it is not necessary to go over all of them.  What you need is the grammar.  I’ll get one and show you how to begin.”

As she arose, there shot through his mind something that he had read in the etiquette books, and he stood up awkwardly, worrying as to whether he was doing the right thing, and fearing that she might take it as a sign that he was about to go.

“By the way, Mr. Eden,” she called back, as she was leaving the room.  “What is booze?  You used it several times, you know.”

“Oh, booze,” he laughed.  “It’s slang.  It means whiskey an’ beer—­anything that will make you drunk.”

“And another thing,” she laughed back.  “Don’t use ‘you’ when you are impersonal.  ‘You’ is very personal, and your use of it just now was not precisely what you meant.”