The Cortlandts of Washington Square

settled down to work with her governess animated by a firm determination to make the best of it, for, in her early appreciation of Mr. Cortlandt's kindness, she felt that it was almost happiness to submit, for his sake, to something which she found so unpleasant. When Fanny Cortlandt was added to the class, she was half sorry, as her pleasure in the other child's society took the edge off the sacrifice she made her guardian. She hated her governess with a passion which absorbed her; at all her ideas of polite behavior she turned up a nose that nature had equipped all too well for that gesture, and she tormented the unfortunate young woman into a nagging which very nearly drove them both distracted. Nevertheless, she quickly learned all that this first incumbent had to teach her, and was enormously bored at being forced to listen to Fanny's instruction on points which she had already mastered. It was on a day when the spring call was sounding clearly in the trembling air, that Ann first disgraced herself. Fanny was struggling with the tables of eight. There was a robin on the railing outside the window, and the discouraged instructress was droning on "sixteen?twenty-four?thirty-two." Ann felt that she could not endure it another moment. "I want," she said, "to get a drink of water." The governess was a Christian young woman, and she looked up at the uneasy child with resigned despair. "Very well," she said, and continued, "forty? forty-eight." Out i...