ed me learned and
blue; Miss Fanshawe, caustic, ironic, and cynical; Mr. Home, a model
teacher, the essence of the sedate and discreet: somewhat conventional,
perhaps, too strict, limited, and scrupulous, but still the pink and
pattern of governess-correctness; whilst another person, Professor Paul
Emanuel, to wit, never lost an opportunity of intimating his opinion
that mine was rather a fiery and rash nature--adventurous, indocile,
and audacious. I smiled at them all. If any one knew me it was little
Paulina Mary.

As I would not be Paulina's nominal and paid companion, genial and
harmonious as I began to find her intercourse, she persuaded me to join
her in some study, as a regular and settled means of sustaining
communication: she proposed the German language, which, like myself,
she found difficult of mastery. We agreed to take our lessons in the
Rue Crecy of the same mistress; this arrangement threw us together for
some hours of every week. M. de Bassompierre seemed quite pleased: it
perfectly met his approbation, that Madame Minerva Gravity should
associate a portion of her leisure with that of his fair and dear child.

That other self-elected judge of mine, the professor in the Rue
Fossette, discovering by some surreptitious spying means, that I was no
longer so stationary as hitherto, but went out regularly at certain
hours of certain days, took it upon himself to place me under
surveillance. People said M. Emanuel had been brought up amongst
Jesuits. I should more readily have accredited this report had his
manoeuvres been better masked. As it was, I doubted it. Never was a
more undisguised schemer, a franker, looser intriguer. He would analyze
his own machinations: elaborately contrive plots, and forthwith indulge
in explanatory boasts of their skill. I know not whether I was more
amused or provoked, by his stepping up to me one morning and whispering
solemnly that he "had his eye on me: _he_ at least would discharge the
duty of a friend, and not leave me entirely to my own devices. My,
proceedings seemed at present very unsettled: he did not know what to
make of them: he thought his cousin Beck very much to blame in
suffering this sort of fluttering inconsistency in a teacher attached
to her house. What had a person devoted to a serious calling, that of
education, to do with Counts and Countesses, hotels and chateaux? To
him, I seemed altogether 'en l'air.' On his faith, he believed I went
out six days in