th
all their tenderness and temerity, I felt somehow that madame would be
the right sort of Minos in petticoats.

In the long run, I found that she was something else in petticoats too.
Her name was Modeste Maria Beck, nee Kint: it ought to have been
Ignacia. She was a charitable woman, and did a great deal of good. There
never was a mistress whose rule was milder. I was told that she never
once remonstrated with the intolerable Mrs. Sweeny [the heroine's
predecessor], despite her tipsiness, disorder, and general neglect; yet
Mrs. Sweeny had to go, the moment her departure became convenient. I was
told too that neither masters nor teachers were found fault with in that
establishment: yet both masters and teachers were often changed; they
vanished and others filled their places, none could well explain how.

The establishment was both a pensionnat and an externat: the externes or
day-pupils exceeded one hundred in number; the boarders were about a
score. Madame must have possessed high administrative powers: she ruled
all these, together with four teachers, eight masters, six servants, and
three children, managing at the same time to perfection the pupil's
parents and friends; and that without apparent effort, without bustle,
fatigue, fever, or any symptom of undue excitement; occupied she always
was--busy, rarely. It is true that madame had her own system for
managing and regulating this mass of machinery; and a very pretty system
it was: the reader has seen a specimen of it in that small affair of
turning my pocket inside out and reading my private memoranda.
_Surveillance, espionnage_, these were her watchwords.

Still, madame knew what honesty was, and liked it--that is, when it did
not obtrude its clumsy scruples in the way of her will and interest. She
had a respect for "Angleterre"; and as to "les Anglaises," she would
have the women of no other country about her own children, if she
could help it.

Often in the evening, after she had been plotting and counter-plotting,
spying and receiving the reports of spies all day, she would come up to
my room, a trace of real weariness on her brow, and she would sit down
and listen while the children said their little prayers to me in
English: the Lord's Prayer and the hymn beginning "Gentle Jesus," these
little Catholics were permitted to repeat at my knee; and when I had put
them to bed, she would talk to me (I soon gained enough French to be
able to understand and eve