“It’s time we were dressing for dinner,” said Jean, prodding her lazy companions. “We should have been outdoors all this time.”
“I’m worried about dinner,” confessed Mabel. “Sallie says that beginning with tonight we have to ask for everything in French and I don’t know enough French to ask for a stewed prune.”
“You don’t have to,” laughed Bettie, “we have those for breakfast.”
“It’s all right anyway,” said Marjory. “Cora says that the girls at our table have a secret code—Maude invented it as soon as she heard about the French. This is it. You punch your next door neighbor once for bread, twice for butter, three times for pickles, four times for potatoes. One pinch means sugar and two pinches for cream. We never get any more meat anyway so there isn’t anything for that. Of course you mustn’t get your pinches and punches mixed up. But isn’t that a grand scheme for beginners in French?”
“Ye-es,” admitted Mabel, doubtfully, “but you see, I sit next to Miss Woodruff. What if I forget and punch her?”
[CHAPTER V—NEW ACQUAINTANCES]
The French teacher, Madame Celeste Bolande, was easily the most interesting of all the teachers. She afforded the girls a vast deal of amusement as well as much annoyance. As a topic of conversation she was inexhaustible. She was truly wonderful to look at but the snapshots that the Miller girls took of her failed to do her justice.
“Doctor Rhodes must have ordered her by mail,” said Cora Doyle, after her first French lesson with the new teacher. “Phew! I’m glad to get outdoors. She was fairly drenched with perfume.”
“Yes,” agreed Debbie Clark. “Doctor Rhodes couldn’t have seen her first or he never would have taken her. What’s that stuff about a pig in a poke? Well, that’s how he got her. I’m sure she isn’t a relative, even by marriage.”
Madame Bolande was really amazing to look at and if the girls spoke of her disrespectfully it was not surprising. No properly brought up little girl could have respected that astonishing lady. Nature had been kind to her; she might have been entirely pleasing to the eye, but for several reasons she was not. She had quantities of black hair, apparently all her own, but it was always greasy and untidy as if it were never washed or brushed or combed. It hung about her face in oily loops that had a way of breaking loose at odd moments, at which times Madame would pin them carelessly in place and go on with the lesson.