I am so ashamed, Lina, not to have written you a long letter before this. You are good to have sent me a letter in reply to those few cards. I had to write to Miss Hilliard, you know, and some way, I haven’t felt like writing about some things that I have really wanted to tell you, like how I felt to be in my mother’s room and all. I’ll wait until I see you, I think. I am going to ask Uncle Pieter, when I know him better, if I can not have a little company this summer. I feel pretty sure that he will let me ask you for a visit, so please keep it in mind before you fill up the summer with other things. Then I can show you everything and tell you all about the mysteries here, for there are some that I do not understand.
I meant to have a long talk with my uncle right away, yet I have been here for several weeks and I have not talked to him alone. I’ve been too timid to ask, for one thing; then he is busy about the place, and then I don’t feel that I can go to him as I can to Miss Hilliard. He lets Cousin Di, or Mrs. Holt, look after my wants.
Please, by the way, keep what I tell you to yourself, except what anybody might know. You will “use judgment” what to report to the girls that know you have had a letter from me.
Your namesake is here, for one, in our family,—“Old P’lina,” they call her and she is so odd. You will have to see her to appreciate her. She is the real housekeeper and just about owns the place. But while you are Adeline, she is Paulina, the i long.
Mrs. Holt is a rather distant cousin who knows Uncle Pieter very well and was a much younger friend of his wife, who is dead. Her mother, Mrs. Perry, will be here pretty soon, they say. She went on a little visit and keeps staying. Cousin Di worries about it, though I’m sure I don’t know why. Two of her friends from Albany have been here this week and they have had a fine time. Uncle Pieter likes to have company, Cousin Andy says, though he doesn’t pay much attention to anybody, I must say. I suppose he just likes to have the big place full of people, not to be lonesome.
Cousin Di is kind and easy-going. My lessons are a myth, for which I am not sorry. I don’t see how I could have studied so far. Uncle Pieter looked at me one time, at dinner, and said, “You need not hurry about lessons, Diana. Jannet looks as if she has had about enough of school. I suppose, Jannet, that you have been trained to think that school hours are the only thing in the world worth keeping?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Aren’t they? Most of the girls I know that amount to anything get their lessons.”
For once Uncle Pieter laughed out. “Yes, yes,” he said, “I suppose that is so. Whatever you have to do, keep at it, if you want to put it through. But we shall change matters a little, with the permission of your guardian, of course.”
I did not like the way he said that, but then he does not know how fine Miss Hilliard is. I looked straight at him, but not saucily, and then I said, “Miss Hilliard is the one who has taken good care of me for all these years.” I did not mean it for a “dig” at him, since of course he did not know that I existed. But I’m sure that he took it that way. He froze right up, and I wished that I had not said anything.
“I must see Miss Hilliard very soon,” he answered, “and relieve her of her charge.”