Chapter Eight.
The Old Legend.
“Jerry,” said Charlotte suddenly, a few days after Claudia’s unlucky attempt, “it’s no use. I’ve tried and I’ve tried to like that girl, at least to have no unkind feelings to her, and it’s no good. Gueda has gone now, and we—that girl and I—seem forced to be together in everything, and I just hate it.”
“But not her,” said Jerry; “it isn’t so bad if it’s only the—the thing, the way it’s come, that you hate, not the girl herself.”
“I don’t know. I’m afraid it’s much the same, and in a queer way I think I’d not mind so much if there were anything to hate about her, but there isn’t. Sometimes I could almost fancy myself liking her awfully, and that makes it worse.”
Charlotte stopped writing altogether and gazed out of the window on to the little deserted garden, looking blacker and drearier than ever in this grim December afternoon, with a sort of despair in her face.
“In spite of her being so horrid and impertinent to you the other day—asking if you were going to be a governess—you—papa’s daughter, and with four brothers to work for you, even supposing you hadn’t a father,” said Jerry wrathfully.
“But after all, perhaps, she didn’t mean it in any horrid, patronising way. I suppose very, very rich people really don’t understand, as papa said. Everybody that isn’t as rich as they seems all much about the same to them, I suppose.”
Jerry gave a sort of growl.
“Then very rich people must be very vulgar and ill-bred,” he said.