Grandmamma has given me most of my education herself since we came to England, and she has been especially particular about deportment.  I have never been allowed to lean back in my chair or loll on a sofa, and she has taught me how to go in and out of a room and how to enter a carriage.  We had not a carriage, so we had to arrange with footstools for the steps and a chair on top of a box for the seat.  That used to make me laugh!—­but I had to do it—­into myself.  As for walking, I can carry any sized bundle on my head, and grandmamma says she has nothing further to teach me in that respect, and that I have mastered the fact that a gentlewoman should give the impression that the ground is hardly good enough to tread on.  She has also made me go through all kinds of exercises to insure suppleness, and to move from the hips.  And the day she told me she was pleased I shall never forget.

There are three things, she says, a woman ought to look—­straight as a dart, supple as a snake, and proud as a tiger-lily.

Besides deportment I seem to have learned a lot of stuff that I am sure no English girls have to bother about, I probably am unacquainted with half the useful, interesting things they know.

We brought with us a beautifully bound set of French classics, and we read Voltaire one day, and La Bruyere the next, and Pascal, and Fontenelle, and Moliere, and Fenelon, and the sermons of Bossuet, and since I have been seventeen the Maximes of La Rochefoucauld.  Grandmamma dislikes Jean Jacques; she says he helped the Revolution, and she is all for the ancien regime.  But in all these books she makes me skip what I am sure are the nice parts, and there are whole volumes of Voltaire that I may not even look into.  For herself grandmamma has numbers of modern books and papers.  She says she must understand the times.  Besides all these things I have had English governesses who have done what they could to drum a smattering of everything into my head, but we never were able to afford very good ones after we left Paris.

There is one thing I can do better than the English girls—­I am English myself, of course, on account of grandpapa—­only I mean the ones who have lived here always—­and that is, embroider fine cambric.  I do all our underlinen, and it is quite as nice as that in the shops in the Rue de la Paix.  Grandmamma says a lady, however poor, should wear fine linen, even if she has only one new dress a year—­she calls the stuff worn by people here “sail-cloth”!  So I stitch and stitch, summer and winter.

I do wonder and wonder at things sometimes:  what it would be like to be rich, for instance, and to have brothers and sisters and friends; and what it would be like to have a lover a l’anglaise.  Grandmamma would think that dreadfully improper until after one was married, but I believe it would be rather nice, and perhaps one could marry him, too.  However, there is not much chance of my getting one, or a husband either, as I have no dot.