It is a measurable feeling.
So she could like him, bits and pieces of a person when estranged from a distance yet she was closer than she ever imagined she would get.
It was unlike the other time, two years ago, when she was too silly in the head for an expedition. Now most of those things have changed. She felt wiser, and braver, like a perpetually-cringing girl with mousy-brown hair and a penchant for thinking. She reckoned her perspectives should be changing along with that as well.
So it was possible that she could like him like the way she did now (though she had yet to come to terms with the hard facts), a photograph with only one person in it. When the words he speaks threatened to tip the very balance inside of her, and her only response was to listen: too awed, too frightened to her bones to do anything else, let alone debate and argue like a proper classmate.
Or--no, she didn't.
She has strayed from her garden path into the beckoning woods, a young woman with sketchbook and perceived emptiness, and fallen head over heels in love fascination with his acute powers of deduction. It was his mind she liked, and beyond that, nothing.