Then drink to Norway’s hills sublime.
Rocks, snows, and glens profound.”
CHAPTER XXII.
“My dear, she is charming, your little Swanhild! She is a born dancer and catches up everything with the greatest ease,” said Madame Lechertier one autumn afternoon, when Sigrid at the usual time entered the big, bare room where the classes were held. She was dressed at madame’s request in her pretty peasant costume, and Swanhild, also, had for the first time donned hers, which, unlike Sigrid’s, was made with the shortest of skirts, and, as Madame Lechertier said, would prove an admirable dress for a pupil teacher.
“You think she will really be of use to you, Madame?” asked Sigrid, glancing to the far end of the big room, where the child was, for her own amusement, practicing a step which she had just learnt. “If she is no good we should not of course like her to take any money.”
“Yes, yes,” said Madame Lechertier, patting her on the shoulder caressingly. “You are independent and proud, I know it well enough. But I assure you, Swanhild will be a first-rate little teacher, and I am delighted to have her. There is no longer any need for her to come to me every morning, for I have taught her all that she will at present need, and no doubt you are in a hurry for her to go on with her ordinary schooling.”
“I have arranged for her to go to a high school, in the mornings, after Christmas,” said Sigrid, “and she must, till then, work well at her English or she will not take a good place. It will be a very busy life for her, but then we are all of us strong and able to get through a good deal.”
“And her work with me is purely physical and will not overtask her,” said Madame, glancing with approving eyes at the pretty little figure at the end of the room. “Dear little soul! she has the most perfect manners I ever saw in a child! Her charm to me is that she is so bright and unaffected. What is it, I wonder, that makes you Norwegians so spontaneous? so perfectly simple and courteous?”
“In England,” said Sigrid, “people seem to me to have two sides, a rough home side, and a polite society side. The Bonifaces reverse the order and keep their beautiful side for home and a rather shy side for society, but still they, like all the English people I have met, have distinctly two manners. In Norway there is nothing of that. I think perhaps we think less about the impression we are making; and I think Norwegians more naturally respect each other.”
She was quite right; it was this beautiful respect, this reverence for the rights and liberties of each other, that made the little home in the model lodgings so happy; while her own sunny brightness and sweetness of temper made the atmosphere wholesome. Frithiof, once more amid congenial surroundings, seemed to regain his native courtesy, and though Mr. Horner still disliked him, most of those with whom he daily came in contact learnt at any rate to respect him, and readily forgave him his past pride and haughtiness when they learnt how ill he had been and saw what a change complete recovery had wrought in him.