“Yes,” Lydia had muttered miserably, and with only too much truth.
She had been happier than ever before, and had made friends with other little girls, and enjoyed the games they played, and the interesting lessons. And she had felt almost sure of getting a prize at the end of the year. But she knew with a dreadful certainty that if she showed her great reluctance to leaving school, and her disappointment and humiliation at being taken away without rhyme or reason, her mother would have a fit of the tempestuous crying that Lydia so dreaded, and would say how heartless it was of her little girl not to want to come home, “now that they only had each other.” So she swallowed very hard, and looked down on the floor, clenching her hands, and made hardly any protest at all. Her only comfort was that her mother’s impetuosity, which could never wait, insisted upon her immediate departure. And Lydia was glad to avoid any farewells, with the astonished questions and comments that must have accompanied them.
She felt that she could never bear to see the nice Kensington school again.
After that she had lessons or holidays as seemed good to her mother, and very seldom spent a consecutive three months in the same place. No wonder that Regency Terrace, unaltered in half a century, seemed a very haven of refuge to Mrs. Raymond’s child.
III
Experience has to be bought, generally at the cost of some humiliating youthful mistakes. Those who profit by these unpleasant transactions early in life may be congratulated.
Lydia, the anxious diplomatist, so acutely desirous of keeping in the good graces of those who had control of her destiny, found that she had made a mistake in approaching Grandpapa privately upon the momentous subject.
Grandpapa, indeed, had received her carefully-thought-out explanation with not too bad a grace.
“So you don’t think you’re learning enough, eh, Lyddie? D’you think you know more than Aunt Beryl already?”
Lydia had nearly cried.