Xenia Georgievna continued:
Again, from PK:
For the duration of her residence at Oyster Bay Anastasia spoke almost entirely in English. Princess Xenia never heard a German word out of her... Anastasia's English accent was "good," Xenia said, although grammatically she was "a bit rusty. That is, English phrases failed her now and then." But there were never any gaps in communication. "The family was so polylingual," Xenia's daughter recalled, "that, when speaking among themselves, they chose a word simply for its precision, from one of several languages, including Russian... My mother deliberately substituted Russian words in the crux of a sentence to see if Anastasia would follow what was said. She always did." Sometimes, too, without thinking about it, Anastasia herself still "burst into Russian." Xenia had bought her two parakeets as a gift from the West Indies. Anastasia was thrilled with the birds and often let them play outside their cage. "Look," she cried in Russian one day, "They are dancing on the windowsill!" She walked through the garden with Margharita Derfelden, talking about the flowers and "calling them by their quaint Russian names." And then once, while Xenia stood unnoticed in her doorway, she heard Anastasia speak to her birds for several minutes entirely in Russian -- "and perfectly acceptable Russian from the point of view of St. Petersburg society." (page 217)
