on chose out three to be her special friends; a Miss Poultenham,
Amelia Reinagle (daughter of an artist who in that day was rather
celebrated), and Mary Brown--niece of Mrs. Latournelle.

M. and Mme. de St. Quentin presently returned, and Mary tells us how
shy she felt when "Monsieur" summoned her to undergo a sort of
examination. "Full well I remember the morning when he called me into
his study to feel the pulse of my intellect, as he said, in order that
he might know in what class to place me. All the girls whom he
particularly instructed were standing by, all of them being superior to
me in the knowledge of those things usually taught in schools. Behold
me, then, in imagination, tall as I am now, standing before my master,
and blushing till my blushes made me ashamed to look up. '_Eh bien_,
mademoiselle,' he said, 'have you much knowledge of French?' 'No, sir,'
I answered. 'Are you much acquainted with history?' And he went on from
one thing to another, asking me questions, and always receiving a
negative. At length, smiling, he said: 'Tell me, mademoiselle, then,
what you do know.' I stammered 'Latin--Virgil,' and finished off with a
regular flood of tears. At this he laughed outright, and immediately
set me down in his class and gave me lessons for every day."

The discipline of the Abbey seems to have been very slack, especially
for the big girls. This is how Mary describes it: "The liberty which
the first class had was so great that, if we attended our tutor in his
study for an hour or two every morning, no human being ever took the
trouble to enquire where we spent the rest of the day between our
meals. Thus, whether we gossiped in one turret or another, whether we
lounged about the garden or out of the window above the gateway, no one
so much as said, 'Where have you been, mademoiselle?'"

Mary Butt spent a year at Reading, where she learnt a good deal of
French, and not, it would seem, much of anything else. She left it the
following Christmas with many tears, thinking that her school-days were
over; but a few months later her parents decided to send her back to
the Abbey for another year, and that her sister Lucy should go too.
That was in the autumn of 1792, when the French Revolution was just
beginning. On January 21, 1793, the terrible news came of the murder of
the unhappy King, Louis XVI. All Europe, and England especially, were
horrified at the cruel deed; and at the Abbey, where there was a strong
F