It is
like a game."
Indeed, Essie and Ellie were so willing to go off to their lessons
every morning, that their mother often thought it could not be all
right, and that the progress, which they undoubtedly made, must be by
some superficial trick; but as their father had so willed it, she
submitted to the present arrangement, deciding that "poor Caroline
was just able to teach little children."
The presence of Essie and Ellie much assisted in bringing Babie back
to methodical habits; nor was she, in spite of her precocious
intelligence, too forward in the actual drill of education to be able
to work with her little cousins.
The incongruous elements were the two elder girls, who could by no
means study together, since they were at the two opposite ends of the
scale; but as Jessie was by no means aggressive, being in fact as
sweet and docile a shallow girl as ever lived, things went on
peaceably, except when Janet could not conceal her displeasure that
Bobus would not share her contempt for Jessie's intellect.
If she told him that Jessie thought that the Odyssey was about a
voyage to Odessa, and was written by Alfred Tennyson, he only
declared that anything was better than being a spiteful cat; and when
he came in from school, and found his cousin in wild despair over the
conversion of 2,861 florins into half-crowns, he stood by, telling
her every operation, and leaving her nothing to do but to write down
the figures.
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