oints are a little softened, because she has not been disappointed,
and consequently soured. In a word, she is a married instead of a
maiden lady. There are three teachers in the school--Mademoiselle
Blanche, Mademoiselle Sophie, and Mademoiselle Marie. The two first
have no particular character. One is an old maid, and the other will
be one. Mademoiselle Marie is talented and original, but of repulsive
and arbitrary manners, which have made the whole school, except myself
and Emily, her bitter enemies. No less than seven masters attend, to
teach the different branches of education--French, Drawing, Music,
Singing, Writing, Arithmetic, and German. All in the house are
Catholics except ourselves, one other girl, and the gouvernante
of Madame's children, an Englishwoman, in rank something between a
lady's-maid and a nursery governess. The difference in country and
religion makes a broad line of demarcation between us and all the
rest. We are completely isolated in the midst of numbers. Yet I think
I am never unhappy; my present life is so delightful, so congenial to
my own nature, compared to that of a governess. My time, constantly
occupied, passes too rapidly. Hitherto both Emily and I have had good
health, and therefore we have been able to work well. There is one
individual of whom I have not yet spoken--M. Heger, the husband of
Madame. He is professor of rhetoric, a man of power as to mind, but
very choleric and irritable in temperament. He is very angry with me
just at present, because I have written a translation which he chose
to stigmatize as '_peu correcte_'. He did not tell me so, but wrote
the word on the margin of my book, and asked, in brief stern phrase,
how it happened that my compositions were always better than my
translations? adding that the thing seemed to him inexplicable. The
fact is, some weeks ago, in a high-flown humour, he forbade me to use
either dictionary or grammar in translating the most difficult English
compositions into French. This makes the task rather arduous, and
compels me every now and then to introduce an English word, which
nearly plucks the eyes out of his head when he sees it. Emily and he
don't draw well together at all. Emily works like a horse, and she has
had great difficulties to contend with--far greater than I have
had. Indeed, those who come to a French school for instruction ought
previously to have acquired a considerable knowledge of the French
language, otherwise the