“But, my dear children,” exclaimed Regina, aghast. “I hear you talking French to each other every day!”
“Yes, I know,” said Ju; “but you hear us talking something that isn’t French.”
“My education,” said Regina, “did not include many modern subjects. That was one reason why I was so very anxious that you two should learn French and German.”
“Then you had better send us to Paris—because French is just what we cannot speak. When we want to talk without the servants knowing, we speak what we call the Park polyglot, but it doesn’t go down with French people. I could see that that friend of Mrs. Charlton’s caught a word here and there, and her native wit supplied the rest.”
“Perhaps she was not a person of position, and did not speak good French,” said Regina, who was loath to admit that a child of hers could do anything badly.
“Oh, not a bit of it! Mrs. Charlton kept calling her Comtesse. She was all right.”
“And how did Miss Drummond come off?”
“Oh, well, Miss Drummond speaks a little honest English-French, which has no pretense of being the real thing.”
It is not surprising that after this, Regina’s two girls were withdrawn from the school at Northampton Park, and were, as she particularly told everybody, by their own request sent to a school kept by a French lady on the outskirts of Paris, to be particular in that off-shoot of Paris which Regina called “Nully.”
During the year that followed, Regina worked harder than ever; indeed, even her complacent husband now and again uttered a mild protest that his wife should be absolutely absorbed by work which brought him neither comfort nor emolument.