The Little French Girl Author:Anne Douglas Sedgwick 1924. Anne Douglas Sedgwick (Mrs. Basil de Selincourt), expatriate American writer whose best-selling fiction observed European and American cultural differences. The Little French Girl was among her most popular works and begins: A clock struck eight, a loud yet distant clock. The strokes, Alix thought, seemed to glide downwards rather than to ... more »fall through the fog and tumult of the station, and, counting them as they emerged, they were so slow and heavy that they made her think of tawny drones pushing their way forth from among the thickets of hot thyme in the jardin potager at Montarel. Sitting straight in her corner of the Victoria waiting-room, the little French girl fixed her mind upon the picture thus evoked so that she should not feel too sharply the alarming meaning of the hour, and seemed again to watch the blunt, sagacious faces of the drones as they paused in sulky deliberation on the top of a spray before launching themselves into the sunlight. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.« less