Éponine couldn't have said what it was she might have expected to find in his apartment. She hadn't known the man, so in truth she should have had no expectations at all, and she had thought it so, until she had actually made her way inside. Now she found it defied her secret projections quite extraordinarily.
They were neighbors, and so to expect his home to be so much grander than her own was rather childish, and yet -- she was a child. It did not show on her always. Often she looked well beyond her years. Often she felt it, too. She would call herself a woman, not a girl, and it was because she had a woman's cares. Food, money, shelter -- survival. A girl was cared for, kept, and coddled. There were some who would be girls well past a young age; some ladies would always be girls.
But Éponine had been a girl only briefly, only in her early childhood, and she had been a woman for some time since.
When Marius produced the letters, she took them quickly, making certain her expression was one of relief and not alarm. She smiled at him with her crooked teeth, holding the letters to her chest. She was not especially eager to take the money just now, though she could hear it in his hand. She found herself not yet ready to leave, and once she had the money, she would have no excuse to stay.
So she turned away, looking down at the letters as though they were something precious. "Ain't you just a gentleman, returnin' our belongin's like that," she said in a tone that was ever-so-slightly too grateful. One might question her sincerity, but never disprove it.
After speaking, she became quite suddenly aware in the differences between her own way of talking and that of the man whose home she had invaded. Of course she knew that she did not speak properly, and this was not the first conversation she'd had with someone who did, but it was always in an expected situation. Of course this man was educated, but he lived where she lived, just next door. He was every bit as much her neighbor as he was a student, and she had never been so painfully cognizant of her own way of speaking before.
"I like books, too, you know," she told him, choosing her words quite carefully, pronouncing them fully. She looked quite smug then. "I bet ya -- you -- didn't take me for someone what could read, did you?"
