Later, they went forth with Mordaunt, and walked across the park, on planks laid upon the pathway, up to Beacon Street, and were reminded of Bath, as one looks down from its century-old crescent; and then they crunched the frozen snow under their spiked shoes, back to the Museum of Fine Arts, where they found a collection of Blake's strange and poetic conceptions, and some memorable sketches by W. M. Hunt, an artist of rare genius, lately deceased, and but little known in England. Copley's portraits—Lord Lyndhurst's father—of which there are so few examples in England, also interested them; and, of course, there were the usual inevitable French pictures, which are the staple commodity of all collections in the States. They passed a pleasant hour here, after which Mrs. Frampton was deposited at the Brunswick, as she declared nothing would induce her to enter the electric car, which was to convey her nephew and niece into the heart of the city.
"I have looked inside one," she said; "that is enough! I saw a double row of people standing up in the middle, clinging on by straps, and jammed against the knees of those who were seated! Never saw anything so shocking in my life. No, thank you. I will go in a carriage, or on my ten toes, or I will remain at home. None of those dreadful tramways for me!"
So they left her, and went their ways. And in their course they ran up against Mordaunt's wiry friend, Reid. He said he had come to Boston for a few days' visit to his mother, "who will be very happy to call on you, Miss Ballinger, if you will allow her." And when Grace had expressed her willingness to be called upon, he continued, "She is a real good woman, my mother; but you must be prepared for some tall talk. It don't amount to much, but it takes a little time to get accustomed to it."
That evening the party assembled by Mrs. Courtly to meet her English friends was peculiarly agreeable. Besides Mr. Laffan and other distinguished men, there were three ladies: one, a poetess whose stirring verse had moved a whole nation's heart, and two sisters whose well-earned reputation for brilliancy had won for them the name of "The Duplex Burners."
Mrs. Frampton was at her best. She was always appreciative of talent, more especially of conversational talent, and would toss into the caldron, now and again, a pungent remark which stimulated alike the powers of the artists and the appetites of those who sat at meat.
The talk turning upon American modes of spelling, she said, in her trenchant way,
"I should have been whipped when I was a child, if I had spelled theatre t-e-r instead of tre. Why, it is neither Latin nor any other tongue!"
"We let 'the dead past bury its dead,'" was the reply. "We follow the living tongues, the tongues in your head and mine, and those distinctly say 'thea-ter.' We don't approve of whipping little girls for spelling as they pronounce, even if the result be to produce such brilliant women as yourself," with a bow.
Mrs. Frampton was reduced to silence for a moment by this un-English compliment, and so her ear caught another that was being proffered to Grace. Her niece was deploring the loss of the letter u in so many words as now printed in America.
"Do you really like the u dropped in such a word as 'parlor'?" she asked of her neighbor.