Mamma didn’t know what Connie was really like; it was one of those things you couldn’t tell her. She said Connie would grow out of it. Meanwhile you could see he wouldn’t. Mr. Hancock had red whiskers, and his face squatted down in his collar, instead of rising nobly up out of it like Papa’s. It looked as if it was thinking things that made its eyes bulge and its mouth curl over and slide like a drawn loop. When you talked about Mr. Hancock, Papa gave a funny laugh as if he was something improper. He said Connie ought to have red whiskers.
Mrs. Hancock, Connie’s mother, was Mamma’s dearest friend. That was why there had always been Connie. She could remember her, squirming and spluttering in her high nursery chair. And there had always been Mrs. Hancock, refined and mournful, looking at you with gentle, disappointed eyes.
She was glad that Connie hadn’t been sent to her boarding-school, so that nothing could come between her and Priscilla Heaven.
Priscilla was her real friend.
It had begun in her third term, when Priscilla first came to the school, unhappy and shy, afraid of the new faces. Harriett took her to her room.
She was thin, thin, in her shabby black velvet jacket. She stood looking at herself in the greenish glass over the yellow-painted chest of drawers. Her heavy black hair had dragged the net and broken it. She put up her thin arms, helpless.
“They’ll never keep me,” she said. “I’m so untidy.”
“It wants more pins,” said Harriett. “Ever so many more pins. If you put them in head downwards they’ll fall out. I’ll show you.”
Priscilla trembled with joy when Harriett asked her to walk with her; she had been afraid of her at first because she behaved so beautifully.
Soon they were always together. They sat side by side at the dinner table and in school, black head and golden brown leaning to each other over the same book; they walked side by side in the packed procession, going two by two. They slept in the same room, the two white beds drawn close together; a white dimity curtain hung between; they drew it back so that they could see each other lying there in the summer dusk and in the clear mornings when they waked.