"'I have hunger!'" grumbles Lottie. "That just shows what a useless humbugging language French is! Fancy any one but an idiot saying, 'I have hunger,' instead of—"
"Don't talk so much. 'Have you my brother's penknife?'"
"Avez-vous mon frère's plume-couteau?"
Miss Lefroy tosses back the tattered Ahn in speechless disgust.
"Never mind, Goggles; I'll give you a sentence to translate," whispers Hal teasingly. "Listen! Esker le policeman est en amour—eh? That's better than anything in an old Ahn or Ollendorff, isn't it? Esker le poli—"
"Hal, do leave your sister alone, and attend to your own task. I don't believe you have got that wretched sum right yet, though you have been at it all the morning."
"And such a toothsome sum too!" says Pauline, leaning forward and reading aloud the problem inscribed on the top of the cracked greasy slate in Aunt Jo's straggling old fashioned writing—
"'Uncle Dick gave little Jemmy five shillings as a Christmas-box. He went to a pastry-cook's, and bought seven mince-pies at twopence halfpenny each, a box of chocolate, nine oranges at one shilling and sixpence per dozen; he gave tenpence to a poor boy, and had four-pence left. What was the price of the chocolate?'"
"It's a rotten old sum—that's what it is!" says Hal trenchantly. "What's the sense of annoying a fellow with mince-pies and things when he hasn't the faintest chance of getting outside one for—"
"Hal, don't be vulgar!"