Betty complained loudly, but soon found consolation. "At any rate," she said, "we need not walk to school with Anna, and we needn't see as much of her there as we should have to at home; and I think it will be rather jolly to know a lot of girls."
"Do you?" sighed Kitty, looking at her sister with curious, wondering eyes, and a feeling of awe. "I can't think so. I can't bear strange girls." It seemed to her incredible that any one should want to know strangers, or could even contemplate doing so without horror. She envied them, though, for being able to. "It must make one feel ever so much more happy and comfortable," she thought, "to have nothing to be afraid of." She would have given a very great deal not to feel shy and embarrassed when with strangers, and to be able to think of something to say to them. But she never could. Nothing that she had to say seemed interesting or worth saying. Betty, with her self-confidence and fluent tongue, was a constant source of admiration to Kitty.
"You will get on all right," she said, with another sigh; "but I was never meant to go where there are other people."
"That is why you've got to go. It is good for you; I heard Aunt Pike saying so to father. She said you were growing up shy and gauche. I don't know what gauche means; do you?"
"No," said Kitty, colouring. "I expect I ought to, and I expect it is something dreadful; but if I am happier so, why can't I go on being gauche?"
"Father said you were very shy, but he didn't think you were the other thing—gauche."
"Did he?" cried poor Kitty, brightening; but her face soon fell again. "Father doesn't notice things as quickly as some people do—Aunt Pike, and Lady Kitson, and others; and I expect they are right. It is always the disagreeable people and the disagreeable things that are right. Did Aunt Pike say the same thing of you?"
"No; she said I had too much—it was a long word—too much self—self— oh, I know, confidence—self-confidence. I don't know what it means, but I am sure I haven't got it; and if I have," wound up Betty defiantly, "I won't get cured of it. Do you know what it means, Kitty?"
"Yes," said Kitty thoughtfully, "I think I do; but I don't see how going to the same school can cure us both."
At the end of a few days Mrs. Pike went away to get Anna, and to collect their numerous belongings; and the doctor's household felt that it had before it one week of glorious freedom, but only one.