"Then you don't study French. I'd study everything if I were you. My wife has read the Hebrew Bible through. She is a scholar as well as a good housewife. It needn't hinder, you see."
"No, sir," repeated Marjorie.
"When little Etienne—that's French for Stephen—was five or six years old he had a long Latin exercise to learn, and he was quite disheartened."
Marjorie's eyes opened wide in wonder. Six years old and a long Latin exercise. Even Hollis had not studied Latin.
"Sitting alone, all by himself, to study, he looked out of the window abroad upon nature in all her glorious beauty, and remembered that God made the gardens, the fields and the sky, and the thought came to him: 'Cannot the same God give me memory, also?' Then he knelt at the foot of his bed and poured out his soul in prayer. The prayer was wonderfully answered; on beginning to study again, he found himself master of his hard lesson, and, after that, he acquired learning with great readiness."
It was wonderful, Marjorie thought, and beautiful, but she could not say that; she asked instead: "Did he write about it himself?"
"Yes, he has written all about himself."
"When I was six I didn't know my small letters. Was he so bright because he was French?"
The gentleman laughed and remarked that the French were a pretty bright nation.
"Is that all you know about him?"