A READY GIRL.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume IX, Issue 29, 16 July 1892, Page 721

A READY GIRL.

It matters very little if our girls are not as thorough in the higher education as we could wish so long as the polishing process they undergo fully develops their wits. At least I thought so (says a writer) when I heard an elegant young lady sing a song in German at a fashionable musicale. Her accent was perfect, the gutturals rolled off as if her vocal organs had never essayed anything else, ami she managed to get so much feeling into word and tone that her listeners were mover! to admiration. Among them was a cultivated German who seemed particularly struck with the quality of her execution. His eyes sparkled behind his big glasses. He approached nearer and nearer to the lovely vocalist, and it was plain that he was ready to fall at the feet of a beautiful girl who was so thoroughly versed in the tongue of the fatherland. As soon as the little stir which followed the hush at the close of the performance was subsided, he addressed her in German with face aglow and hands clasped in repressed rapture. I happened to know that the young lady was incapable of putting a sentence together in German unaided by text book and lexicon, and that her parrot performance of the song had been her exhibition role on reception days at the fashionable school that finished her oil', so I curiously watched the encounter. With a charming smile, and unabashed eyes looking full into those of her admirer, she exclaimed :— • Oh, 1 beg pardon, Herr Strachan, but after being raised to the heights by that divine song it seems a profanation to descend to compliment in the same language? The German's face was a study. Mild amazement, disappointment, doubt, admiring deference, all struggled for supremacy. But the girl stood as unmoved as a statue of Truth,confident that her wits were equal to any emergency.