Her exclamation was not lost; — Mad. de Rosier determined to cultivate her talents for arithmetic. Without fatiguing Matilda’s attention by long exercises in the common rules, she gave her questions which obliged her to think, and which excited her to reason and to invent; she gradually explained to her pupil the relations of numbers, and gave her rather more clear ideas of the nature and use of the common rules of arithmetic than she had acquired from her writing-master, who had taught them only in a technical manner. Matilda’s confidence in herself was thus increased. When she had answered a difficult question, she could not doubt that she had succeeded; this was not a matter that admitted of the uncertainty which alarms timid tempers. Mad. de Rosier began by asking her young arithmetici
