Six year-old Barbara stood in her little frock of spotted muslin by the side of the grand piano piping out in a thin treble the words of this old French nursery rhyme. Her eyes were fixed on the illustration by Boutet de Monvel which shows three most unmistakeable _gamins_ following in the wake of a fisher-girl who shrinks with a timid expression from the words which one can almost hear on their naughty little lips. Barbara understood the picture little more than she understood the words of the song and really, I reflected, that was a very good thing. The old French tune is very dainty, but there is in the words that tang of sexuality which the French seem to imbibe with their mother’s milk. “Ils vous font des caresses,” indeed! Six-year-old Barbara has better things to do at her age than to imagine that she is the quarry of the male with all the advantages and disadvantages of this position. Little French girls, for all the superficial strictness of their bringing up, are, apparently, never allowed to look on the world with any other eyes than the eyes of the woman. Our English girls learn to do this quickly enough, but at least they are allowed to begin their lives in perfect innocence. If they pay for this by seldom acquiring the last fine shade of attractive femininity, they gain in the frankness and fearlessness which are the gift of our incomparable English nursery ways. The bloom then fostered never entirely departs, no matter how experience may try it. To the last the English woman remains a sociable being with whom one could potentially set off with on a walking tour, an inconceivable enterprise with a French one or an Italian, who have learnt the grammar of passion and of its imitations young, to be obsessed with it always, while the English girl has been absorbing the grammar of health, of goodfellowship and of games.