t the rewards of
learning English are as slight as its difficulties are great, and they
warn their fellows to this effect. Nor does the oral sound of English
allay the prejudice thus created. Soothing and dear and charming that
sound is to English ears. But no nation can judge the sound of its own
language. This can be judged only from without, only by ears to which it
is unfamiliar. And alas, much as we like listening to French or Italian,
for example, Italians and Frenchmen (if we insist on having their
opinion) will confess that English has for them a rather harsh sound.
Altogether, it seems to me unlikely that the world will let English
supplant French for international purposes, and likely that French will
be ousted only when the world shall have been so internationalised
that the children of every land will have to learn, besides their own
traditional language, some kind of horrible universal lingo begotten on
Volapuk by a congress of the world's worst pedants.

Almost I could wish I had been postponed to that era, so much have
I suffered through speaking French to Frenchmen in the presence of
Englishmen. Left alone with a Frenchman, I can stumble along, slowly
indeed, but still along, and without acute sense of ignominy. Especially
is this so if I am in France. There is in the atmosphere something that
braces one for the language. I don't say I am not sorry, even so, for my
Frenchman. But I am sorrier for him in England. And if any Englishmen
be included in the scene my sympathy with him is like to be lost in my
agony for myself.

Would that I had made some such confession years ago! O folly of pride!
I liked the delusion that I spoke French well, a delusion common enough
among those who had never heard me. Somehow I seemed likely to possess
that accomplishment. I cannot charge myself with having ever claimed to
possess it; but I am afraid that when any one said to me 'I suppose you
speak French perfectly?' I allowed the tone of my denial to carry
with it a hint of mock-modesty. 'Oh no,' I would say, 'my French is
wretched,' rather as though I meant that a member of the French Academy
would detect lapses from pure classicism in it; or 'No, no, mine is
French pour rire,' to imply that I was practically bilingual. Thus,
during the years when I lived in London, I very often received letters
from hostesses asking me to dine on the night when Mme. Chose or M. Tel
was coming. And always I excused myself--not on the pl