“Courageous!” echoed Kitty. “I wonder if you will believe in their courage when you feel yourself in that scrape which sooner or later must happen? But, as I said, I am often sorry that I am clever; I should not have done half the things I have done but for my cleverness. Mother wasn’t a bit like that. I don’t remember her very well, but I have a few of the letters which she left, not to me but to father. Perhaps I take after father; I never saw him, you know, but I do know one thing, and that is that Auntie Gloriana is very like me, only not a quarter as sharp and smart and knowing. Oh dear; oh dear! When a girl is handsome, as I know I am, and is put in a school with a whole lot of rich girls—for most of you are rather rich, whatever you may like to say to the contrary—she is in a nest of temptation, nothing less. And then, when I see, as I do see, how easily I can get the upper hand of you all, why, I just get the upper hand, and there I am. But now, my dear Anne, what is the mystery? It must be pretty bad or you wouldn’t have come tootling along here this morning.”
“It is pretty bad. You know Miss Weston?”
“The dressmaker? Rather. That reminds me that I really think, after a time, we ought to go to a more stylish person. I was looking last night at Mrs. Wyndham’s dress, and though, of course, what suits an elderly lady is not suitable for a schoolgirl; nevertheless there is a cut about them that Miss Weston, with all her trying, could never aspire to. Yes, I really do think we ought to go to a better class of dressmaker by-and-by.”
“Kitty!” said Anne, “Kitty!”
“Oh my dear Anne, what a doleful note! Well, here’s Kitty, Kitty.”
“Don’t laugh at me, Kitty, for goodness’ sake! Do you really suppose that Grace and I are always to dress you, to provide you with your smart things?”
“I don’t know what you feel about it,” was Kitty’s rejoinder; “but for the present I look upon you both as the people who clothe me. It’s very funny, isn’t it?” Kitty gave a merry laugh. “And very nice too,” she added; “and your father is doing a lot of good without knowing it. What’s that verse in the Bible which says, ‘Let not your right hand know what your left hand doeth.’ Well, that’s what your father is doing for me.”
“Oh Kitty, I wish you wouldn’t talk like that! Do you know, it’s dreadful!”
“Is it dreadful, poor little Anne, poor little Anne?” Kitty stroked Anne’s arm as she spoke; but Anne pulled it away with almost violence.
“No,” she said, “I can’t stand it—I can’t, Kitty. I have something dreadful to say to you, and I must say it. Do you know that father is awfully angry about our account being so large at Miss Weston’s? Now you know perfectly well that the account wouldn’t be large at all but for you, Kitty. It’s that frock you’re wearing now, and the blue velvet with the real lace—oh surely you might have done with imitation lace!—and that primrose evening dress, and those two white muslins, besides lots of odds and ends—those black silk stockings, for instance, and those nice little shoes. Oh dear! oh dear! and that hat you have on your head now, with that great big ostrich feather in it! It’s those things which have run up the bill.”