only to herself and the
dolls. Every doll there had a personality, a history, and a character of
its own. Barbara was the intimate of all of them--the confidential
friend and companion, who listened to their imagined recitals of griefs
and joys with a sympathetic soul, counseled them in a prematurely old
way, chided them gently but firmly for their mistakes, commended good
conduct whenever she discovered it in them, and almost mercilessly
rebuked such shortcomings as common sense should have spared them. For
common sense was Barbara's dominant characteristic.

She never told their stories to anybody. That, she felt, would have been
to betray their confidence shamefully. It was only by eavesdropping on
the part of her nursery maid, and by casual overhearings of her talk
with her dolls that their life stories became known to anybody except
herself.

And Barbara quickly put an end to the eavesdropping when she discovered
it. She had a French nursery governess, Mathilde, whose double function
it was to look after the child and to teach her French by talking to her
only in that tongue. The maid, in fact, made the child teach her
English, by talking with her chiefly in that language.

That, however, was an offense the child did not consider. She did not
greatly value instruction in French--"English is so much better," she
used to say to her aunt. "And besides, nobody ever talks in French. So
why should we bother about it? Of course, I like to have La Fontaine's
Fables read to me, and I like to read them to my dolls, because the
dolls always enjoy them."

"How do you know that, Barbara?"

"Why, because they never interrupt. When I tell them 'make up' stories
of my own, they often interrupt me. They 'want to know,' and sometimes I
can't tell them. But with La Fontaine's stories it is never so. Still I
don't think French is of much consequence."

That was the ill-informed and immature judgment of a child of seven or
eight years. Perhaps the other judgment with which that same child
coupled it in the lectures she sometimes gave her French nursery
governess was sounder.

"Mathilde, you are an eavesdropper," she solemnly said to the girl one
night. "You hide behind the door and listen while Phillida tells me
about the way Corydon treats her. And you listen while I tell Phillida
not to be foolish, and while I talk to Corydon about his behavior. I
shouldn't mind that so much, Mathilde, if you didn't laugh at the dolls
and t