It is funny that when you are with Eugenia you can't help feeling the same way she does about what she's telling; that it is right to break the rules and skip recitations and torment the teachers and play jokes on the girls not in their set. She seems to have a great influence over Lloyd. I don't believe godmother would like it if she knew how much. Already Lloyd has promised to tease her father and mother into letting her go to New York next fall, to enter Eugenia's school. She told us that it is very select, and said, "You know sometimes schools that advertise themselves as being awfully select are no better than those horrid public schools, for they take anybody who applies, no matter how common they are." Joyce asked her why she called public schools horrid, and she answered in such a disgusted, patronising way, "Oh, nobody who _is_ anybody would go to a public school." That made Joyce mad, and she told her that she went to one and that she was proud of it; that where she lived public schools were considered better than the private ones. They had better teachers and more progressive methods; and she said she wouldn't give up the Plainsville High School for all the select seminaries in New York. Then Eugenia drawled in _such_ a bored tone, "Oh, _wouldn't_ you! Well, maybe _you_ wouldn't, being from the West, you know. I've always heard it spoken of out there as wild and woolly, and I suppose it is all a matter of taste." Then she gave a provoking little laugh, and began to hum a tune, as if public schools and people who went to them were too common for her to think about. Joyce looked out of the window with a sort of don't-care expression, and said something in French. Of course I couldn't understand it, but she told me afterward that it was a well-known proverb about the opinion of a wise fool. Eugenia was so astonished! She did not know that Joyce can speak French. She has a way of using it herself all the time when she talks. She is always throwing in a French word or sentence that Lloyd and I can't understand. Joyce laughed about it to me the first day she came, and said Eugenia is just as apt to use the wrong word as the right one. This was the first time that Joyce had spoken French, and Eugenia was so surprised she couldn't help showing it, and asked her why she had never said anything before in that language. Joyce told her that her teacher never allowed her to mix the languages. She said it was in bad taste to do so in speaking to people who only understood one; that it seemed affected, or as if the person wanted to show off how much she knew. Then that made Eugenia mad, and she asked her in a spiteful way if it was a public school teacher that told her that, and said she didn't know that they taught French out West. Joyce said yes, that they did, but that of course a year abroad was quite a help, and that before she left France they told her that her accent was quite Parisian.