history a most interesting study.

For another "treat," as Janey Fricker called it, they went on the Sunday
to drink tea with Miss Foster at her mother's. Mrs. Foster was a widow
with ideas of gentility in poverty. She was a chirping, bird-like little
woman, and lived in a room as trellised as a bird-cage. The house was on
the site of the old ramparts, and the garden sloped to the _fosse_. A
magnolia blossomed in it, and delicious pears, of the sort called "Bon
chrêtiens," ripened on gnarled trees. This week was, in fact, a
beautiful little prelude to school life, if Bessie had but known it. But
her appreciation of its simple pleasures came later, when they were for
ever past. She remembered then, with a sort of remorse, laughing at
Janey's notion of a "treat." Everything goes by comparison. At this time
Bessie had no experience of what it is to live by inelastic rule and
rote, to be ailing and unhappy, alone in a crowd and neglected. Janey
believed in Mrs. Foster's sun-baked little garden as a veritable pattern
of Eden, but Bessie knew the Forest, she knew Fairfield, and almost
despised that mingled patch of beauty and usefulness, of sweet odors and
onions, for Mrs. Foster grew potherbs and vegetables amongst her
flowers.

Thus Bessie's first week of exile got over, and except for a sense of
being hungry now and then, she did not find herself so very miserable
after all.




CHAPTER XI.