258
PARTISAN REVIEW
"No, Mr. Brock, I would not," said Miss Pride sternly. "I do not
share your enthusiasm for foreign languages. And as for dog-books
I had no use for them in my girlhood and feel quite sure I would
find them even less to my taste now that I have passed beyond the
age for juvenile literature."
He was not rebuffed. "I admire your linguistic singleness, Miss
Pride, since
in
you I am not sure it is the result of strong nationalistic
convictions. Alas, we are not all by opinion or antecedents eligible
for membership in the English Speaking Union."
"I am not a member of the English Speaking Union," she re–
turned. "But in any case your remark is, to use a foreign phrase, a
non sequitur."
Mr. Brock, receiving the book which she extended, allowed his
disappointment to show briefly in
his
foolish old face and then,
catching sight of me, he cried, "Now here is someone whose father
will appreciate the book." In a voice a little lower but not intended
to be inaudible to me, he added, "Did you realize that this child's
father is an educated man?"
"I believe I haven't had the pleasure of knowing him." Miss
Pride took me in, perhaps for the first time since I had been coming
to the Hotel, and I felt that in her rapid but comprehensive examina–
tion of my face and person she had discerned everything about me,
that she knew I had once broken my collarbone, that I did poorly
in
arithmetic and singing and well in reading, and that brushing my
teeth had not yet become habitual with me.
"Yes," Mr. Brock went on, "Hermann Marburg, the Chichester
cobbler, is an educated man. A graduate of the
gymnasium
of Wiirz–
burg, Germany, and, except for an ineffacable accent which I myself
find appealing, has been completely bilingual since the age of eleven,
and partially trilingual-his third language, of course, being French
-since the age of fifteen."
Miss Pride did not seem impressed but rather than humiliate me,
as I assumed, said nothing. "I have had several illuminating conver–
sations with Mr. Marburg, sometimes in German, sometimes in
English. I neglected to mention, by the way, that through his wife
he has also picked up quite a considerable Russian vocabulary. Now
a graduate of a
gymnasium,
Miss Pride, as you are perhaps not
aware, is,
if
anything better educated than a candidate for an Amer–
ican baccalaureate degree. Yet the
gymnasium
is the counterpart of
our preparatory school!"
"What do they learn?" inquired Miss Pride, frankly dubious.
"Having been something of a Latinist myself at Mr. Greenough's,
