“All bosh,” he said. “My granddaughter is a natural, unaffected, unspoiled girl. You send her off to Madam Tippetywitch, or whoever she is, and she’ll come back an artificial young miss, with no thought but for fashions and foolishness.”
But the old gentleman was entirely overruled by the determination of his wife, and Betty was sent away.
None of the family accompanied Betty to the school, as Mrs. Irving felt sure the child would be less homesick if she started off with a gay party of girls who were going back to their classes.
And so good-bys were said at the station in Boston, and Betty made the trip to Hillside in company with half a dozen school-girls, in charge of one of the teachers. It was a strange position in which Betty found herself. An heiress in her own right, she yet felt a sense of inferiority which she herself could not explain.
Her Irish ancestry revealed itself in her warm-hearted willingness to be friends with the girls, and her inherited New England nature made her reserved and sensitive to either real or apparent slights from them. The girls, notwithstanding their inborn good breeding and their past seasons at Hillside Manor, looked at Betty with ill-concealed curiosity. They knew she was an heiress, and that very fact made them hold aloof from her, lest they be suspected of a spirit of toadying to wealth.
But Betty did not appreciate this point, and assumed that the girls were not very cordial because they considered themselves her superiors. Each one spoke to her, politely enough, but in constrained, perfunctory fashion, and then, feeling their duty done, they resumed their own chatter about matters unknown to Betty. Miss Price, the teacher, was a pleasant-faced lady, but, after a few courteous words, she became absorbed in a book, looking up only now and then to glance at her young charges. After a time Betty’s spirit of independence became aroused. She wondered if she were excluded from the girls’ sociability because she herself was lacking in cordiality. Smiling pleasantly, she said to Ada Porter, who sat next to her: “Are you in my classes?”
“I don’t know, really,” said Ada, not unkindly, but entirely uninterested. “What classes are you in?”
“I don’t know,” said Betty, smiling at the absurdity of the conversation.
But Ada didn’t seem to think it humorous, and merely stared at Betty, as she said, “How queer!”
Betty colored. She felt awkward and tongue-tied, and yet, the more she realized her inability to impress these girls pleasantly, the more she determined to do so.