After a few idle days, Anne was enrolled in the city free school. Miss Dorcas mourned over the fact that she was unable to send her small cousin to a select private school, and urged her to study hard, behave well, and, above all, never to have anything to do with 'the common herd' of other children. Anne obeyed the last command very unwillingly. It would be dreadful to be "contaminated,"—which she supposed to mean infected with a bad kind of measles,—as Cousin Dorcas said she would be if she played with her grade-mates; but it was hard to sit primly alone instead of joining the recess games.
At first some of the children tried to make friends with her but, being met coolly, they left her to lonely dignity.
"It's goot," wonderingly explained Albert Naumann, a sturdy, blond little German, when she refused a bite of the crimson-cheeked winesap apple that he offered.
"Why not?" asked merry-faced Peggy Callahan, when Anne declined her dare to a foot-race. "You're not sick, are you?"
"No, indeed!" answered Anne.
"Oh! you look sorter like I feel when I've a pain in my stomach," said Peggy, running off in reply to a playmate's call.
Anne looked after her longingly. Peggy was a bright, merry, friendly child with whom she would have liked to play, but for being sure Cousin Dorcas would object. Peggy was certainly one of the 'common herd'—her clothes ragged or patched and her person rather dingy.
Anne was lonely.
"It's worse than being all by myself," she reflected soberly, "to see the other children's good times and be out of them all."
She consoled herself as best she could with Honey-Sweet, disagreeing stoutly with Miss Dorcas who thought that she was too large a girl to play with dolls.