Certainly Tom could not deny acquaintance with those classics. “I never took much stock in Mother Goose,” he said, starting on with his pail again.
“But you’ve heard of them,” Kate cried triumphantly. He did not look back this time, but he was evidently meditating. As for Kate, she felt that the acquaintance had begun in an auspicious manner, and perched on the side of the cutting machine to wait for his return.
They were together preparing some cut-feed for Dobbin’s evening meal when the girls looked in at the door, and the talk was evidently flowing with the greatest ease.
“This is just like a cutting machine we used to have at home, and I have special reason to remember it,” Kate was saying as she turned the wheel, “for I nearly lost the end of my thumb in it when I was a little tot. Father was at home, as good luck would have it, and he fixed it up so quick that no great harm came of it.” She held up a pink thumb for Tom’s inspection, and added, “You wouldn’t know it now by anything except the nail being a little thicker than common at one corner, and that’s really been an advantage to me, for I can open a jack-knife without asking a boy to do it for me.”
Tom gave a grunt of approval. “And sharpen the pencil too?” he asked. Then, suddenly: “Are there many boys out your way? There are more girls here.”
“Oh, there are lots of boys,” said Kate, and then she added: “but the nicest one of all has gone to college, and we don’t see much of him nowadays. Are you going to college?”
He stirred the cut-feed for a minute without speaking, then shook his head. “Stella wants me to go,” he said, “and grandfather used to talk about it, too, but he’s sort of given it up lately. I guess he thinks I’m not scholar enough; and I’m not,” he added frankly. “I don’t take to studying. I’d rather work with things that are outside of my own head.”
Kate dropped the handle of the cutting machine. “Tom,” she exclaimed, in a tone of heartfelt sympathy, “that’s just the way I feel, too. I never did like school as Esther and Mort and some of the others do. I don’t want to be a stupid, of course—you have to know things or you’re no account; but for my part, I’d never get them out of books if I could get them any other way. I like people and affairs better.”
There is nothing like downright honesty to prepare the way for friendship. They had made a frank disclosure of feeling on an important subject, and Kate and Tom were comrades from that moment; comrades, in spite of the fact that certain other points of view were by no means held in common, and that each contended strenuously for his own. They talked for a long time of cousinly affairs. With his mother’s quiet way of looking at things, Tom had a considerable spice of his grandfather’s shrewdness, and Kate found his opinions on various matters interesting.
“Aunt Katharine must be a strange woman,” she said, when they had touched on a variety of other subjects. “Do they always fight, she and grandfather, as they did to-day?”