'Would you put Thackeray--' I began diffidently. Mrs. Barnes stopped me at once. 'Our father,' she said--again my hands instinctively wanted to fold--'who was an excellent judge, indeed a specialist if I may say so, placed him among the Immortals. Therefore I am content to leave him there.' 'But isn't that filial piety rather than--' I began again, still diffident but also obstinate. 'In any case,' interrupted Mrs. Barnes, raising her hand as though I were the traffic, 'I shall never forget the influence he and the other great writers of the period had upon the boys.' 'The boys?' I couldn't help inquiring, in spite of this being an interrogation. 'Our father educated boys. On an unusual and original system. Being devoid of the classics, which he said was all the better because then he hadn't to spend any time remembering them, he was a devoted English linguist. Accordingly he taught boys English,--foreign boys, because English boys naturally know it already, and his method was to make them minutely acquainted with the great novels,--the great wholesome novels of that period. Not a French, or Dutch, or Italian boy but went home--' 'Or German,' put in Mrs. Jewks. 'Most of them were Germans.' Mrs. Barnes turned red. 'Let us forget them,' she said, with a wave of her hand. 'It is my earnest desire,' she continued, looking at me, 'to forget Germans.' 'Do let us,' I said politely. 'Not one of the boys,' she then went on, 'but returned to his country with a knowledge of the colloquial English of the best period, and of the noble views of that period as expressed by the noblest men, unobtainable by any other method. Our father called himself a Non-Grammarian. The boys went home knowing no rules of grammar, yet unable to talk incorrectly. Thackeray himself was the grammar, and his characters the teachers. And so was Dickens, but not quite to the same extent, because of people like Sam Weller who might have taught the boys slang. Thackeray was immensely interested when our father wrote and told him about the school, and once when he was in London he invited him to lunch.' Not quite clear as to who was in London and which invited which, I said, 'Who?' 'It was our father who went to London,' said Mrs. Barnes, 'and was most kindly entertained by Thackeray.' 'He went because he wasn't there already,' explained Mrs. Jewks. 'Dolly means,' said Mrs. Barnes, 'that he did not live in London. Our father was an Oxford man. Not in the narrow, technical meaning that has come to be attached to the term, but in the simple natural sense of living there. It was there that we were born, and there that we grew up in an atmosphere of education. We saw it all round us going on in the different colleges, and we saw it in detail and at first hand in our own home. For we too were brought up on Thackeray and Dickens, in whom our father said we would find everything girls needed to know and nothing that, they had better not.'