“I will write to Aunt Kate,” said she, “she will understand. Oh, how I wish I could see her! She must be a dear, soft, pussy, cuddly sort of person. Why shouldn’t I go and see her? I will.”
And on this desperate resolve she acted.
Now I find it quite impossible any longer to conceal from the intelligent reader that the reason why Kitty had never seen Aunt Kate was that “Aunt Kate” was merely the screen which sheltered from a vulgar publicity the gifted person who wrote the “Answers to Correspondents” for the Girls’ Very Own Friend.
In fear and trembling, and a disguised hand-writing; with a feigned name and a quickly-beating heart, Kitty, months before, had written to this mysterious and gracious being. In the following week’s number had appeared these memorable lines:
“Sweet Nancy.—So pleased, dear, with your little letter. Write to me quite freely. I love to help my girls.”
So Kitty wrote quite freely, and as honestly as any girl of eighteen ever writes: her hopes and fears, her household troubles, her literary ambitions. And in the columns of the Girls’ Very Own Friend Aunt Kate replied with all the tender grace and delightful warmth that characterised her utterances.
The idea of calling on Aunt Kate occurred to Kitty as she was “putting on her things” to go to the Guildhall. She instantly threw the plain “everyday” hat from her, and pulled her best hat from its tissue-paper nest in the black bandbox. She put on her best blouse—the cream-coloured one with the browny lace on it, and her best brown silk skirt. She recklessly added her best brown shoes and gloves, and the lace pussy-boa. (I don’t know what the milliner’s name for the thing is. It goes round the neck, and hangs its soft and fluffy ends down nearly to one’s knees.) Then she looked at herself in the glass, gave a few last touches to her hair and veil, and nodded to herself.
“You’ll do, my dear,” said Kitty.
Aunt Eliza was providentially absent at Bath nursing a sick friend, and the black-bugled duenna, hastily imported from Tunbridge Wells, could not be expected to know which was Kitty’s best frock, and which the gloves that ought only to have been worn at church.
When Kitty’s music lesson was over, she stood for a moment on the steps of the Guildhall School, looking down towards the river. Then she shrugged her pretty shoulders.