quite another world than ours. If it was not that he has the same nose
and chin as grandmamma, one would say she had bought him somewhere,
and that he could not be her own son.

Hephzibah says he is good-natured, so perhaps that is why he made a
_bêtise_ in South America. One ought never to be called good-natured,
grandmamma says--as well write one's self down a noodle at once. While
we were in Paris we hardly ever saw papa either; he was always out
West in America, or at Rio, or other odd places. All we knew of him
was, there was plenty of money to grandmamma's account in the bank.

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