However, I did not sleep that night. Next morning Tom's Aunt Elizabeth apologized, and for Back Bay was really unbending.
Some days later we returned to New York, and I thought my troubles were over for a time. But the first night Tom came home full of excitement. He had been appointed to the diplomatic corps, and we were to sail for England within a month!
The news struck chill terror to my heart. With so much still to learn in my native America, what on earth should I do in English society?
II.
More than two months passed after the night my husband announced his foreign appointment before we sailed for England.
I planned to study and to have long talks with him about the customs of fashionable and diplomatic Europe, but alas! I reckoned without the friends and pretended friends who claim the time of a man of Tom's importance. Besides, he and I had so many other things to discuss.
So the sailing time approached, and then he announced that we were to be presented at court! I was thrilled half with fear and half with joy.
I remembered from my reading of history that some of England's kings had not spoken English and that French had been the court language. I visited a bookstore and purchased what was recommended as an easy road to French, and spent all morning learning to say, “l'orange est un fruit.” I read the instructions for placing the tongue and puckering the lips and repeated les and las until I was dizzy. Then I looked through our bookcases for a life of Benjamin Franklin. I knew he had gone to court and “played with queens.”
But the great statesman-author-orator gave me no guide to correct form or English social customs. Instead I grew so interested in the history of his work in England and France and in his inspiring achievement in obtaining recognition and credit for the United States that dinner time arrived before I realized I had not discovered what language was spoken at court, nor what one talked about, nor if one talked at all.