She had never had time to cultivate any art except music, but her sense of everything lovely in form and colour and sound was exquisite, and she became without study a supreme artist in at least one department. At the time of the coronation of Queen Wilhelmina of Holland, there was a grand Exhibition of all that women can do in the modern world. A deputation waited on the Maréchale and begged her to give an address along with two other well-known lady speakers. She agreed to come, provided she should be allowed to choose her own subject. Consent was readily given, and she delivered an address in French upon what Christ has done for Woman and what Woman for Christ. She gave no thought to the manner of delivery; she merely realised that she had a golden opportunity of proclaiming her Saviour to a magnificent audience. She had never in her life received a lesson in elocution, and to have done so might have seemed to her wicked backsliding. But she was awarded the palm of eloquence.
If her scholastic education was somewhat defective, she was wonderfully guided by her instincts in her later self-education. During her American tour she was taken one day by three white-haired professors to see the greatest library in the States. Her unsophisticated mind was bewildered by all that mass of learning. "Surely," she said, "it must strike despair into the minds of the students!"
One of her guides questioned her about her own favourite books.
"Well," she answered, "I have never been a reader; I think I have only two."
"The Heart of Man. I am always at it, on land and sea, in the streets and in railway carriages, morning, noon and night. It helps me with my first book better than any commentary."
She came to know the Bible with a thoroughness which not one man in ten thousand ever attains. Her spiritual instinct seized, and her extraordinary memory retained, the vital and the essential. She never studied the Bible in the ordinary way, sitting down with lexicon and concordance. There was no time for that in her busy life. She took her spiritual food from the Bible as the bee sips honey from flowers. The Bible was her companion and she read it for pleasure. She absorbed and assimilated it without effort. That she knew much of it by heart was of less importance than the fact that it became part of herself. Therein lay her power of expounding and applying it. "Nothing," said Dr. Munroe Gibson after listening to her nightly for a week, "charmed our people more than her expositions of Scripture."