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 Bruyère the next, and Pascal, and
Fontenelle, and Molière, and Fénelon, 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 régime_. 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 _à l'anglaise_. Grandmamma
would think that dreadfully improper until after one was married, but