"Yes, I'd just as soon, only when one comes to think of it, I've learnt all they can teach me, as far as I know. We are both of us much too big to be at that school--it's a perfect farce. Why don't you take us away and give us a course of lessons? That is the proper thing to do--like they do in Paris. Or why don't you send us to Paris for a year? Then we may contrive to speak French that is French, and not Park polyglot." "Maudie!" cried Regina. "Yes, I know, dearest. You may say 'Maudie!' but facts are facts. The other day, being, or being supposed to be, the best French speaker in the school, I was put up to talk to a French lady who was staying at the Vicarage. You know Mrs. Charlton speaks French like a native--indeed, I think she has French relations, and I think this was an old schoolfellow. Anyway, I was put up to talk to her as being the show girl at French conversation." "Well?" Regina's tone was as the sniff of a war-horse who scents the battle from afar. "I couldn't make head or tail of her," said Maudie. "Ju did--at least, in a kind of way she did. All the same she had to repeat everything she said three times over, and then whatever-her-name-was had to make shots at her meaning." "But, my dear children," exclaimed Regina, aghast. "I hear you talking French to each other every day!" "Yes, I know," said Ju; "but you hear us talking something that isn't French." "My education," said Regina, "did not include many modern subjects. That was one reason why I was so very anxious that you two should learn French and German." "Then you had better send us to Paris--because French is just what we cannot speak. When we want to talk without the servants knowing, we speak what we call the Park polyglot, but it doesn't go down with French people. I could see that that friend of Mrs. Charlton's caught a word here and there, and her native wit supplied the rest." "Perhaps she was not a person of position, and did not speak good French," said Regina, who was loath to admit that a child of hers could do anything badly. "Oh, not a bit of it! Mrs. Charlton kept calling her Comtesse. She was all right." "And how did Miss Drummond come off?" "Oh, well, Miss Drummond speaks a little honest English-French, which has no pretense of being the real thing." It is not surprising that after this, Regina's two girls were withdrawn from the school at Northampton Park, and were, as she particularly told everybody, by their own request sent to a school kept by a French lady on the outskirts of Paris, to be particular in that off-shoot of Paris which Regina called "Nully." During the year that followed, Regina worked harder than ever; indeed, even her complacent husband now and again uttered a mild protest that his wife should be absolutely absorbed by work which brought him neither comfort nor emolument.