She had obeyed her grandmother and her aunts, done her household tasks and embroidered.
He remembered the grimy bit of linen which he had picked up and he could not see the very slightest connection between that sort of thing and love and romance.

Of course, she had read a few love stories and the reasoning by analogy develops in all minds.

She might have built a few timid air castles for herself upon the foundations of the love stories in fiction, and this brought him around to the fatal subject again almost inevitably.
"Do you know, Miss Eustace," he said, "that I am wishing a very queer thing about you ?" "What, Mr.von Rosen ?" "I am wishing, you know that I would not esteem you more highly, it is not that, but I am wishing that you also had written a book, a really good sort of love story, novel, you know." Annie gasped.
"I don't mean because Mrs.Edes wrote _The Poor Lady_.

It is not that.

I am quite sure that you could have written a book every whit as good as hers but what I do mean is--I feel that a woman writer if she writes the best sort of book must obtain a certain insight concerning human nature which requires a long time for most women." Von Rosen was rather mixed, but Annie did not grasp it.