Ella spelled rather unusually well, perhaps because in all her eight years she had seldom seen or heard a word spelled incorrectly; but her handwriting was about as bad as it could be, especially toward the end of the page, where the “loops and tails” pointed as many ways as if they had been an explosion of fireworks. The tall principal, John’s father, taught penmanship, and the little girl, with a copybook, a red-painted penholder, and a viciously sharp “Gillott, 303,” took her place at one of the long, slanting tables in the hall. It was much too high for her, but no one was troubled about that in those days. If a table was too high, it was because the child was too short, and that was all there was to it.
Day after day, Ella wrote in her copybook whole pages of such thrilling statements as, “Be good and you will be happy,” and, “Honesty is the best policy.” Of the truth of the first she was by no means convinced, for she remembered being—of necessity—very well behaved, indeed, when she was not at all happy. As to the second, she had no idea what “policy” was. She asked the principal very shyly what the sentence meant, and he said it meant that little boys and girls must always tell the truth. Of course no decent children ever told lies, thought Ella, with a vague indignation. She pondered over the reply, and at length made up her mind that the writing-book must have been printed for children that were ragged and dirty and said “ain’t got none.” She had to finish the page, but every line was worse written than the one before it. The principal looked a little grave and asked if she was sure that she had done her best. Ella hung her head and said nothing; but maybe she had done her best—under the circumstances.
The principal tried his utmost to teach her to write the fine “Spencerian” hand that was then so admired; but the wicked little “Gillott, 303,” continued to stick in the paper and make sprays of ink all about—which Ella rather admired as incipient pictures—and the red-painted wooden penholder still aimed at whatever point of the compass happened to suit the comfort of the little cramped fingers. “Where should the pen point?” the principal would patiently ask; and with equal patience the pupil would reply, “Over the right shoulder.” It would turn into place obediently, but long before the teacher had reached the other end of the long table, it was again pointing out the north window toward the lake or out the south window to the hill and the rocks. And why not? Where the thoughts were, surely the pen might point also.
Ella felt as if she was quite a busy little girl, for besides her lessons in arithmetic and penmanship, there was half an hour of French every day. It was good strong old-fashioned French, too, learned by main force from a grammar. She recited patiently, “Ah, bay, say, day,” etc., as she was taught; but in her heart of hearts she thought it utter foolishness to spoil perfectly good English letters by giving them such names. She learned that there were such things as nasal sounds, objected to in English, but highly esteemed in French; and she learned to translate into the French language and pronounce—with an accent that would have thrown the politest Frenchman into a state of collapse—such interesting dialogue as, “Have you the girl’s glove?” “No, sir, but I have the cook’s hat”; and such bits of tragedy as, “My brother’s tailor has broken my slate,” or—most touching of all—“I liked the little girl, but she did not like me.”
French, even grammar French, carried Ella into a new world. She concluded that to harmonize with its caprices she ought to take a French name when, so to speak, she entered France by way of Fasquelle’s Grammar and the French recitation room. Somewhere she had heard the word “elephantine,” and she had read, in English, about Fantine and Cosette. She concluded that this fine-sounding word—only she would spell it
and put on plenty of accents, circumflexes, because she thought acutes and graves had an unfinished look—would accord nicely with her own name and would also be a compliment to the French, especially if it was pronounced with a good strong nasal sound in the middle of the word.
She was rather too shy to ask the French teacher to call her
, but she wrote the name in her Fasquelle, and had fine times saying it over to herself when she was alone. One day the mother happened to take up the book, and she showed Ella in the dictionary what the word meant. All the poetry went out of it then, for Ella always bowed to the authority of the big dictionary; and she promptly rubbed out the new name, accents and all.