One day, when he asked the usual question, Jeannette's countenance grew troubled.
"Next week," she confided, "we are to have written examinations in everything and there are a thousand spots where I haven't caught up with the class. Mathematics, language, United States history, and French. The books are different, you see, from the ones I had. I'll have to cram. Mathematics are the worst. I can't do the examples."
"Suppose you bring them to me, after lunch. I used to think I was a mathematician."
That was the beginning of a curious friendship between the little girl and the very quiet old man. After that, there was hardly a day in which Jeanne, whose class was ahead of her in mathematics, did not appeal for help.
She liked her grandfather. He seemed nearer her own age than anyone else in the house. You see, when people get to be ninety or a hundred, they are able to be friends with persons who are only seventy or eighty—a matter of twenty years makes no difference at all. Mr. Huntington was sixty-eight, which is old enough to enjoy a friendship of any age.
But when people are young like Pearl and Clara, two years' difference in their ages makes a tremendous barrier. Clara was almost three years older than Jeanne, and Pearl was fourteen months older than Clara. Harold was younger than his sisters but older than Jeanne, who often seemed younger than her years.
Pearl and Clara looked down, with scorn, upon any child of twelve. Indeed, they had been born old. Some children are, you know. Also, it seemed to their grandfather, they had been born impolite. For all that they called her "The Cinder Pond Savage," Jeanne's manners were really very good. She seemed to know, instinctively, how to do the right thing; that is, after she became a little accustomed to her new way of living. And she was always very considerate of other people's feelings. So was her grandfather, most of the time. But Mrs. Huntington wasn't; and her children were very like her; cold, self-centered, and decidedly snobbish.
Jeanne was quite certain that her girl cousins had never played. Harold, to be sure, occasionally played jokes on the younger members of the family or on the servants; but they were usually rather cruel, unpleasant jokes, like putting a rat in Maggie's bed, or water in Pearl's shoes, or spiders down Clara's back. For Jeanne, he reserved the pleasant torture of teasing her about her father.
"Ugh!" he would say, holding Jeanne's precious mail as far as possible from him, while, with the other hand, he held his nose, "this must be for you—it smells of fish. Your father must have sold a couple while he was writing this."
Sometimes he would point to shoe advertisements in the papers, with: "Here's your chance, Miss Savage. No need to go barefoot when your five years are up. Just lay in a whopping supply of shoes, all sizes, at one-sixty-nine."