Kitty Trenire

by Mabel Quiller-Couch

"It is not, in the strict sense of the word, a school," Miss Richards always remarked to the parents of new pupils. "We want it to be 'a home from home' for our pupils, and I think I may say it is that."

"If our homes were in the least bit like it we should never want any holidays," one girl remarked; but we know that it is almost a point of honour with some girls never to admit—until they have left it—that school is anything but a place of exile and unhappiness,—though when they have left it they talk of it as all that was delightful.

Amongst the boarders, and loudest in their complaints of all they had to endure, were Lettice and Maude Kitson, who had been placed there by their step-mother for a year to "finish" their education before they "came out." It was a pity, for they were too old for the school, and it would have been better for themselves and every one had they been sent amongst older girls and stricter teachers, where they would not have been the leading pupils and young ladies of social importance. They laughed and scoffed at the usual simple tastes and amusements of schoolgirls, and, one being seventeen and the other eighteen, they considered themselves women, who, had it not been for their unkind stepmother, would have been out in society now instead of at school grinding away at lessons and studies quite beneath them. Their talk and their ideas were worldly and foolish too, and as they lacked the sense and the good taste which might have checked them, they were anything but improving to any girls they came in contact with.

Kitty had never liked either of the Kitson girls; they had nothing in common, and everything Lettice and Maude did jarred on her. They seemed to her silly and vulgar, and they did little petty, mean things, and laughed and sneered at people in a way that hurt Kitty's feelings. Yet now, so great was her nervous dread of the school and all the strangers she would have to meet, she felt quite pleased that there would be at least those two familiar faces amongst them. "And that will show how much I dread it," she said miserably to Betty the night before. "Think of my being glad to see the Kitsons!"

"Oh well," said Betty cheerfully, "they will be some one to speak to, and they will tell us the ways of the school, so that we shan't look silly standing about not knowing what to do. They won't let the others treat us as they treat new girls sometimes either, and that will be a good thing," which was Betty's chief dread in going to the school.

Anna expressed no opinion on the matter at all. She was more than usually nervous and fidgety in her manner, but she said nothing; and whether she greatly dreaded the ordeal, or was quite calmly indifferent about it, no one could tell.

But the feelings of the three as they walked to the school that first morning were curiously alike, yet unlike. All three were very nervous. Kitty felt a longing, such as she could hardly resist, to rush away to Wenmere Woods and never be heard of again. Betty was so determined that no one should guess the state of tremor she was in, lest they should take advantage of it and tease her, that she quite overdid her air of calm indifference, and appeared almost rudely contemptuous. Anna, though outwardly by far the most nervous of the three, had her plans ready and her mind made up. She was not going to be put upon, and she was not going to let any one get the better of her; at the same time she was going to be popular; though how she was going to manage it all she could not decide until she saw her fellow-pupils and had gathered something of what they were like. In the meantime nothing escaped her sharp eyes or ears. All that Kitty or Betty could tell her about the school, or Miss Richards, or the girls, especially the Kitsons, she drank in and stored up in her memory, and they would have been astonished beyond measure could they have known how much her hasty wandering glances told her, resting, as they did, apparently on nothing.

Before the first morning was over she knew that Helen Rawson was admired but feared; that Joyce Pearse was the most popular girl in the school, and had taken a dislike to herself, but liked Kitty and Betty; that Netta Anderson was Miss Richards's favourite pupil, and that she herself did not like Netta; and that Lettice Kitson was not very wise and not very honourable, and that Maude was the same, but was the more clever of the two.

To Betty the morning had been interesting, though alarming at times; to Kitty it was all dreadful, and she went through it weighed down by a gloomy despair at the thought that this was to go on day after day, perhaps for years.

The most terrifying experience of all to her was the examination she had to undergo to determine her position in the school. Anna was used to it, so bore it better, and to Betty it was not so appalling, but to Kitty it was the most awful ordeal she had ever experienced. "Having teeth out is nothing to it," she said afterwards, and her relief when it was over was so intense that she thought nothing about the result, and was not at all concerned about the position assigned her, until Anna came up to her brimming over with condolences, and apologies, and scarcely concealed delight.