CHAPTER XVIII.
THE young Anglo-Swiss evidently derived both pleasure and profit
from the study of her mother-tongue. In teaching her I did not,
of course, confine myself to the ordinary school routine; I made
instruction in English a channel for instruction in literature.
I prescribed to her a course of reading; she had a little
selection of English classics, a few of which had been left her
by her mother, and the others she had purchased with her own
penny-fee. I lent her some more modern works; all these she read
with avidity, giving me, in writing, a clear summary of each work
when she had perused it. Composition, too, she delighted in.
Such occupation seemed the very breath of her nostrils, and soon
her improved productions wrung from me the avowal that those
qualities in her I had termed taste and fancy ought rather to
have been denominated judgment and imagination. When I intimated
so much, which I did as usual in dry and stinted phrase, I looked
for the radiant and exulting smile my one word of eulogy had
elicited before; but Frances coloured. If she did smile, it was
very softly and shyly; and instead of looking up to me with a
conquering glance, her eyes rested on my hand, which, stretched
over her shoulder, was writing some directions with a pencil on
the margin of her book.
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