Gorgas, who knew French, found the phrase new. She wondered if anyone would ever need to “have been regarded.” But to Mlle. Schwartz it was the open sesame to all of French; that and its even more bristling negative interrogative:
Shall I not have been regarded?
Shalt thou not have been regarded? etc.
The prize of Mlle. Schwartz’s praise went to a little be-spectacled girl on the front row who knew her “shall-have-been-regarded’s” backward and forwards.
“Ah! Bessie,” Mlle. Schwartz would pounce on her in despair of the others, “the past anterior!” Bessie knew the past anterior. “The pluperfect!” Bessie knew the pluperfect. And the subjunctive, and the indicative interrogative.
Gorgas felt ashamed. She knew no French, after all! In spite of all her chatter with Bardek, she was ignorant of the language. So she edged over to the Bessie girl at the fifteen minute recess, shyly, as one would toward a superior.
“It was beautiful,” Gorgas spoke quickly in French, a nervous tribute to the perfect scholar. “Ah! how it was beautiful, the conjugations which you know so well!”
“Huh?” Bessie looked across her spectacles. She was munching a bun, and spoke with difficulty.
“The French that you know so wonderfully!” Gorgas kept eagerly to the French. “I speak it and read it, but I never knew about the conjugations. Is it very hard? When I heard you speak I was ashamed not to know them. They all seemed so familiar, yet I did not know them.”
“Don’t she talk funny!” Bessie smiled weakly at the group beside her. Then she added, “I don’t understand her. Is it some foreign language?”