h
Prentice took out to bake for dinner, remarking regularly that little
miss promised to be helpful, to which Aunt Victoria as regularly
responded Yes, she hoped Miss Beth would become a capable woman some
day.

After breakfast they read the psalms and lessons together, verse by
verse, and had some "good talk," as Beth called it. Then Aunt Victoria
got out an old French grammar and phrase-book, a copy of "Telemaque,"
and a pocket-dictionary, treasured possessions which she always
carried about with her, and had a kind of pride in. French had been
her speciality, but these were the only French books she had, and she
certainly never spoke the language. She would have shrunk modestly
from any attempt to do so, thinking such a display almost as
objectionable as singing in a loud professional way instead of
quietly, like a well-bred amateur, and showing a lack of that
dignified reserve and general self-effacement which she considered
essential in a gentlewoman.

But she was anxious that Beth should be educated, and therefore the
books were produced every morning. Mrs. Caldwell had tried in vain to
teach Beth anything by rule, such as grammar. Beth's memory was always
tricky. Anything she cared about she recollected accurately; but
grammar, which had been presented to her not as a means to an end but
as an end in itself, failed to interest her, and if she remembered a
rule she forgot to apply it, until Aunt Victoria set her down to the
old French books, when, simply because the old lady looked pleased if
she knew her lesson and disturbed if she did not, she began at the
beginning of her own accord, and worked with a will--toilsomely at
first, but by degrees with pleasure as she proceeded, and felt for the
first time the joy of mastering a strange tongue.

"You learnt out of this book when you were a little girl, Aunt
Victoria, didn't you?" she said, looking up on the day of the first
lesson. She was sitting on a high-backed chair at one end of the
table, trying to hold herself as upright as Aunt Victoria, who sat at
the other and opposite end to her, pondering over her knitting. "I
suppose you hated it."

"No, I did not, Beth," Aunt Victoria answered severely. "I esteemed it
a privilege to be well educated. Our mother could not afford to have
us all instructed in the same accomplishments, and so she allowed us
to choose French, or music, or drawing and painting. _I_ chose
French."

"Then how was it grandmamma learned