“She need not say it five minutes from now,” put in Adele. “She can begin with Bon jour, can’t she, Miss Eloise? Say Bon jour, Jessie.”
Jessie obediently repeated the words.
“Now you can say good-day,” Adele told her, “and you can’t say any more that you don’t know a word of French.” Then she turned to Miss Eloise and chatted away volubly for a minute or two while Jessie listened and wondered if she would ever be so glib with a foreign tongue.
“I think I will make a rule that you are to speak to each other only in French during lesson hours,” said Miss Eloise. “That will give you both a chance and Jessie will be surprised how soon she will be able to understand and speak a number of words. Now we will start in with something else. Come here, Jessie, and show me how far you have gone in arithmetic and how well you can spell.”
It turned out that Jessie was far ahead of Adele in these studies, but that the latter knew more history and had a smattering of a number of other things which Jessie knew nothing about. But after a while Miss Eloise managed to arrange classes for them, dropping some of Adele’s studies, which did not seem necessary for the present, and adding some to Jessie’s list. But they had hardly settled down to real work before it was time for a morsel of lunch and a fifteen minutes’ run out-of-doors.
“I don’t think those were very bad pills to take,” said Jessie as the two sat munching their apples on the porch steps.
“They will be worse after a while, I suppose,” said Adele. “Wait till you have to sit at the piano and practice stupid exercises half an hour at a time. You won’t like that one bit.”
“I suppose not,” returned Jessie with a sigh. “But you don’t have to do that all the time, do you? You will have pieces after a while.”
“Oh, after a fashion, but they are not what I call tunes,” she said scornfully.
This sounded very discouraging, but Jessie was not going to give up hope. “Maybe some teachers do that way,” she said, “but I don’t believe Miss Eloise will.”