"My dear child, you don't mean to say you think those monstrous tinsel spheres beautiful! Why, they're perfectly hideous!"
Mary regarded her grandmother in amazement. She must be mad. She must be upset by the journey. She must be joking.
"Oh, and look! That garden's got five!" she shrieked, nearly falling out of the fiacre in her delight. "One purple. One silver. One blue. One gold. And one red. I hope in heaven there are thrillions and thrillions of them."
"God forbid!" exclaimed Lady Flower, sniffing her vinaigrette in dismay at the picture. "And I suppose you mean trillions."
Mary was silent after this until the fiacre took them beyond the main street into an avenue of clipped acacias and limes, from which they turned aside through wide paths into a curved drive where hydrangeas bloomed in the beds on either side.
"What funny flowers!" Mary exclaimed. "They're like the little woman in a house Uncle ... Fawcus ... Mr. Fawcus gave me. When it was going to be wet, her bonnet and dress was pink and when it was going to be fine they were blue. Only really she wasn't ever pink or blue, but like those flowers, and then she was always wrong."
The fiacre pulled up before a house with a white portico and French windows opening to the wide verandah that ran round it.
"Is this really going to be my school?" Mary asked incredulously. "Why, I thought it was going to be quite an ugly place. Oh, Grandmamma," she cried, "how kind of you to give me such a nice school!"
Lady Flower had been influenced by a number of considerations in her choice of a school for Mary, but what undoubtedly had least influence was her granddaughter's point of view in the matter. Nevertheless, as grown-up people use, she accepted the child's gratitude with complacency.
It certainly was a good school. Mademoiselle Lucinge was a woman of taste and breeding, who when little more than a girl had gone as governess to the house of an English nobleman, where she had remained ten years. Having inherited from a distant relative a house and a small property, she had felt justified in carrying out a project upon which she had for a long time set her heart. During her stay in England she had had an opportunity of coming into contact with a number of distinguished people, and from the moment she had opened her pension she had been successful. The greater number of her pupils were English, but many other nationalities were represented; and Lady Flower, who was prejudiced in favor of a cosmopolitan education, thought that in Mademoiselle Lucinge she had found the ideal person to correct in her granddaughter the effects of a deplorable upbringing, for which, strange to say, she did not in the least blame herself.