Malbrouck s'en va-t-en guerre, or the glories of Cadet Roussel? And this, remember, for girls of sixteen and seventeen—craving intelligent and exciting pastimes! How fervently I used to bless the headache or cold that permitted me to slip up to bed after supper, and escape from the evening recreation into the more peopled and interesting solitude of my own thoughts. Things may be better since my day. Tennis, bathing, golf, cricket, and racing may now be admitted as feminine pastimes in those holy establishments where I spent so many miserable and profitless years. I hear that even baths are introduced, and that it is no longer deemed by French nuns an offence against modesty to wash oneself. But I recall a very different state of affairs—a state so curious that my French friends do not like to credit it when I assure them of it. I was fourteen when I was sent to school in France to acquire the tongue of courts and diplomacy. On the first morning that I awoke in the long, white-curtained dormitory, I proceeded to wash and dress myself as I had been taught to wash and dress in English convents. I had deposited my dressing-gown on my bed, and was splashing my neck with water, when, to my astonishment, a nun approached me noiselessly, lifted my dressing-gown from the bed, and holding her shocked glance averted murmured, La
