to go to France, in order to learn French
thoroughly. As he pointed out, it would take three years at least to
become proficient in French and German, and it would be as well to
begin at once.

The French tutor selected for me enjoyed a great reputation at that
time. Oddly enough, she was a woman, but it will be gathered that she
was quite an exceptional woman, when I say that she had for years ruled
four unruly British cubs, varying in age from seventeen to twenty, with
an absolute rod of iron. Mme. Ducros was the wife of a French judge,
she spoke English perfectly, and must have been in her youth a
wonderfully good-looking woman. She was very tall, and still adhered to
the dress and headdress of the "sixties," wearing little bunches of
curls over each ear--a becoming fashion, even if rather reminiscent of
a spaniel.

The Ducros lived at Nyons in the south of France. Nyons lay twenty-five
miles east of the main line from Paris to Marseilles, and could only be
reached by diligence. I think that I can safely say that no foreigner
(with the exception of the Ducros' pupils) had ever set foot in Nyons,
for the place was quite unknown, and there was nothing to draw
strangers there. It was an extraordinarily attractive spot, lying in a
little circular cup of a valley of the Dauphine Alps, through which a
brawling river had bored its way. Nyons was celebrated for its wine,
its olive oil, its silk, and its truffles, all of them superlatively
good. The ancient little walled town, basking in this sun-trap of a
valley, stood out ochre-coloured against the silver-grey background of
olive trees, whilst the jagged profiles of the encircling hills were
always mistily blue, with that intense blue of which the Provence hills
seem alone to have the secret. So few English people knew anything
about the conditions of life in a little out-of-the-way French
provincial town, where no foreigners have ever set foot, that it may be
worth while saying something about them. In the first place, it must
have been deadly dull for the inhabitants, for nothing whatever
happened there. Even the familiar "tea and tennis," the stereotyped
mild dissipation of little English towns, was quite unknown. There was
no entertaining of any sort, beyond the formal visits the ladies were
perpetually paying each other. The Ducros alone, occasionally, asking
their legal friends to dinner, invitations accepted with the utmost
enthusiasm, for the culinary genius who