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LOUISE.

When at last these two uncomfortable years of school life came to an end, I found myself again with my mother. There was a certain eagerness in her greeting accounted for by the pleasure she invariably felt when my absence from "home" -- as she euphemistically called our private and perambulating asylum -- had proved an unpleasant experience.

"You must now stay in a French family to lose your Swiss accent", she said.

In reality, that I was now grown up came to her as a surprise, and she found difficulty in deciding how to dispose of me. With all her aloofness from life, she was not detached from certain feminine vanities. The desire to appear younger than her years was one of these.

By chance, in the "Galignani" (the Paris New York Herald of the time) she found an advertisement that seemed to suit the occasion. At Neuilly a musical family offered the comforts of a French home to young ladies desirous of pursuing French and musical studies.

"You can take singing lessons", exclaimed my mother, without even knowing if I had a voice.

She took me to Neuilly herself and there, in one of the side streets we stopped at a small, dingy house which hid successfully behind it a still smeller and dingier yard. Monsieur et Madame Bidout who greeted us in the stuffy sitting-room, were old and unpleasant to look at; no less unpleasant was Toto the fat brown dog who, jumping on Madame's lap, lay in its sagging centre during the entire visit.