Beauty looked up, surprised to find anyone so deeply modest as he. Her eyebrows raised high and she gave him a truly charmed smile. "Do you know that?" she asked, keeping her voice soft enough to be acceptable in the library. She didn't return to English. It was a treat to be able to speak in the language that her heart knew. "Mayhaps you should reconsider, sir, though I wouldn't fight you on 'interesting' or 'intriguing,' either!"
She released him, only to sift through the old newspapers. They would be digitally scanned and sorted soon; they were beginning to show their age. But she knew just exactly where to look, and she was glad that they hadn't yet been sorted into a computer. There was something far more pleasing in reading from paper -- and it seemed that the librarians here agreed.
"This is from the time when the City was trapped inside a human body. It.... he stayed with me in my cottage. Usually, the City is a large island, floating in the deep reaches of space. Did you know that the City is alive? It is, alive, and thinking, and so very curious about us. It likes us quite a lot -- and it needs us, too, to help it defend itself from others like it." She paused, then gave Abe a bit of a smile. "It sounds mad, I know. It's all true. Here..."
And she smoothed out the paper that reported about the press conference that Thomas Townsend held.