Horace Latham shook his head slowly. “I wonder.”
“Oh, I don’t; I’m sure.”
He studied the fire flames gravely for a time. Then he sighed, shook off the mood her words had called forth, and turned to her lightly.
“And what benefit has Mrs. Hilary reaped from the war?”
She knitted her brows, and sat very still. Suddenly her face kindled and her lips quivered mutinously.
“I know. I’ve learned how to spell sugar.”
Latham laughed. This woman who spoke three other tongues as fluently and probably as erratically as she did English, and whose music was such as few amateurs and not all professionals could approach, was an atrocious speller, and every one knew it who had ever been favored with a letter from her. Latham had been favored with many. He had waste-paper-basketed them at first—but of late he did not.
“I can!!” she insisted. “S-U-G-A-R. There! Sugar, color, collar, their, reign, oh! what I’ve suffered over those words! I spent a whole day once at school hunting for ‘sword’ in the dictionary (I do think of all the silly books dictionaries are the silliest), and then I never found it. Think of shoving a w into sword. Who wants it? I don’t. Nobody needs it. Silly language.”
“Which language can your high wisdomship spell the least incorrectly?” he asked pleasantly.
“Mein werter Herr Doktor, das Buchstabiren ist mir Nebensache. Ich sprache vier Sprachen flissend—Sie kaum im Stande sind nur eine zu stammeln doch glauben Sie dass eine Frau ohne Fehler sei wenn sie richtig Englisch schreibt und nur an die drei k’s denkt—wir man in Deutschland zu sagen pflegt—Kirche, Kinder und Küche,” she said in a torrent.