“Taught you—taught you Latin?” gasped Rhoda.
“Just a little Latin and Greek; there wasn’t time for much,” humbly responded Phoebe.
“Greek!” shrieked Rhoda.
“Very little, please,” deprecated Phoebe.
“Phoebe, you dear sweet darling love of a Phoebe!” cried Rhoda, kissing her cousin, to the intense astonishment of the latter; “now won’t you, like a dear as you are, just tell me one or two Greek words? I would give anything to outshine Molly and make her look foolish, I would! She doesn’t know one word of Greek—only Latin. Do, for pity’s sake, tell me, if ’tis only one Greek word! and I won’t say another syllable, not if Madam gives you a diamond necklace!”
Phoebe was laughing more than she had yet ever done at White-Ladies. She was far too innocent and amiable to think of playing Rhoda the trick of which Melanie’s father was guilty, in Contes à ma Fille, when, under the impression that she was saying in Latin, “Knowledge gives the right to laugh at everything,” he cruelly caused her to remark in public, “I am a very ridiculous donkey.” Phoebe bore no malice. She only said, still smiling, “I don’t know what words to tell you.”
“Oh, any!” answered Rhoda, accommodatingly. “What’s the Greek for ugly?”
“I don’t know,” said Phoebe, dubiously. “Kakos means bad.”
“And what is good and pretty?”
“Agathos is good,” replied Phoebe, laughing; “and beautiful is kallios.”