The Little French Girl

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

“Now we will show you everything,” said Ruth when luncheon was over. The implication seemed to be that a specially fortunate experience was in store for her. A fond complacency breathed from both girls. “And it is natural that one should love one’s home,” thought Alix, the tolerance of her comprehension giving her childish face a maturity beyond its years.

So she was led from the lawn to the shrubberies; shown the summer-house where in summer they had tea and the herbaceous border, neatly disposed for its winter sleep. The kitchen-garden was displayed, and at its far end they passed through a door to a little path, bordered by gorse-bushes, that ran beneath the garden-wall and then turned aside over the common. It was a sheltered, solitary little path, the branches of the garden fruit-trees hanging over it, and Alix felt that it might often be a refuge for her. It was a pretty path and had a character of its own. To Ruth and Rosemary its meaning lay in leading somewhere else, and they crossed the common and rambled in the birch-wood, inciting each other to long jumps over a sluggish little stream, half ditch, half brook, that flowed through it, and encouraging the dogs with loud cries to chase the scurrying rabbits on the further hillside.

“There’s the jolliest walk along the top,” said Ruth, “among the junipers. But perhaps you are tired. French girls aren’t much good at walking, are they?”

“I walk a good deal in the country,” said Alix, “but I think I will unpack my box now.”

“Edie will have unpacked it for you,” said Ruth, “so we’ll go on; only say if you are tired. You wear sensible shoes, I must say. I thought all French girls pinched their toes.”

So they continued to walk, talking as they went, asking her for none of her information, only imparting theirs, as if it must, self-evidently, have superior value. Alix heard them with interest when they told of Giles and of his scholastic feats at Oxford, feats interrupted by his departure for the war, but now to be resumed. Philosophy was Giles’s special branch, and they told her that he was going to teach philosophy, at Oxford probably, and write it some day.

“Tiens!” said Alix, relapsing, as was her wont when surprised, into French. She knew nothing of philosophers and the word only conjured up a picture of someone aged and bearded who drank hemlock.

“Yes,” said Ruth, accepting the ejaculation as a tribute, “he’ll be a great man, all right, Giles.”

And Alix also learned that Ruth and Rosemary both intended following professional careers and that their father had come from the north and had built Heathside and that their mother was a Londoner and that her father had been the editor of an important London paper. “What! Never heard of ‘The Liberal’!” Ruth exclaimed. Ruth, as eldest, did most of the talking, subjected to frequent interruptions from Rosemary. “I should have thought even French people would have heard of ‘The Liberal.’ Oh, yes, he was a great swell, our grandfather.”

Alix did not think she would have found him so. France, she saw, mainly existed for Ruth and Rosemary as a place where one’s brothers had gone to fight and one’s friends to nurse.