But then he surprised Marise very much and said something she never forgot. It gave her such a jump of astonishment to have Father say something as though he really meant it, that she sat up straight at his first words, staring at him. He said in a strong voice, "But look here, Molly, there _is_ something in the air here, by heck, and I wish you'd get it. I mean the way every one of them in this country keeps right after what he's doing, till he's got it just right. That's the way to do, and we're all off the track with our 'that'll do,' the way we say back in America. It's the only thing in their whole darned country _I_ can see, that don't make you sick. Now, look here, kid, you go after it and get it. Start right in now. Learn how to make that infernal note-book perfectly all right in spite of the bad paper. I wish to the Lord _I_ had been taught that." And then, while Marise was still staring, the words echoing loudly in her ears because of the strangeness of hearing them from Father, he went on in his usual voice, "It might be _something_ to hold on to, and I don't see much else." Marise had never before known Father in any way to try to "bring her up!" He made Maman so much provoked because he always said that he didn't know, any more than Marise, how she ought to be brought up, and he didn't see that it made so much difference what you did, everything turned out about the same in the long run. Now her little room seemed full of the oddness of his thinking that something did matter, of his telling her so hard that he wished she'd do something. In the loud silence which followed, she could hear his voice and what it said, sinking deeper and deeper into her mind. After a while Father yawned very wide and rubbed his hair forward and back so that it was all rumpled up the way Maman didn't like to see it. "What did you say you were doing?" he asked again. "I'm writing down my lecon d'orthographe," said Marise. "Your _what_!" said Father. "My spelling lesson," Marise corrected herself with a jerk. She knew how Father hated to have people mix up their languages. "Well, I don't know that you're any worse off at that than we are in the sitting-room," said Father. He always called the _salon_ the sitting-room. He added, glancing at her blank note-book, "You haven't got very far, I see." He paused, and smiled a little with one corner of his mouth, "But then neither have we in the sitting-room." It came into Marise's mind that perhaps Father, seeing he was so specially serious to-night, might tell her some way to keep her thoughts from jiggling around so, from one way of feeling to another, according to what other people thought of things, instead of knowing what she thought of things. But she had no chance to ask him, for when she began, "Well, I sort of forgot about my spelling. I got to thinking," Father broke in, as he got up heavily to go, "I wouldn't advise you to do _that_, either. It never gets anybody anywhere."