"`My dear, I never suffered more than when I first came here, and Therese telling everyone how amusing I was, and myself sitting as dumb as a mummy! I can talk quite beautifully now, and wriggle about like a native. I'll teach you how to shrug your shoulders, and you hold up your dress quite differently in France, and it's fashionable to be fat. Last night Therese let me have two girls for _souper_. They are called Marie and Julie, and wear plaid dresses, and combs in their hair. I like them frightfully, but they are very rude sometimes, saying France is better than England, and that we have big teeth and ugly boots. Then they got angry because I laughed, and said England always thought she was right, but that everyone else knew she was a cheat and a bully, and that she was the most disliked nation on earth! "And you are the politest," says I, quite composed, and at that they got red in the face, for I was all alone, and there were two of them in their own country. "`When they went away they kissed me, and said they were sorry, and that my teeth weren't big a bit, and I said France was an elegant country, but you couldn't wear high heels in Ireland, or you'd never be free of the bog. It's a pity French people don't like us, and I don't think they always mean exactly what they say, but they make beautiful things to eat. "`Therese gives me cooking lessons out of school hours, and I've lost my taste for coffee with grounds in it, like we had at Knock. Everything is as clean as if it were quite new, and there is such a different smell in the houses--a lonely smell! It makes me long for home and you, and a peat fire, and all the people in the streets speaking English, and never as much as thinking of the tenses of verbs. "`You are quite sure I may come home in January, aren't you, Bridgie? You are not saying it just to pacify me? I'll tell you a secret! Once I thought of running away and coming back to you in London, because I couldn't bear myself any longer. I said to Therese, just in a careless kind of way, as if I had only thought of it that moment: "Supposing now that a young girl was in Paris, and wanting to run away to her friends in England, how would she set about getting there?" "`And she never suspected a bit, for she said:--