“I haven’t contradicted you when you said that,” said Claudia; “but I don’t think that I am cleverer than she is. In German I have perhaps had unusually good teaching—that is all.”
“You will get the prize if you try, you know that,” Jerry persisted. “If you give up trying Charlotte will think it a piece of wonderful good fortune. But I don’t think she or any one could be very surprised. You have everything you want, why should you care to work extra for a prize like that? It isn’t as if you had been years at Miss Lloyd’s, like the others—and—and—cared about it like them. And the teachers think you too grand, to be vexed with you whatever you do.”
“Grand,” repeated Claudia, with a little laugh, but it was not a bitter one. “I only wish you all—” but she stopped. There was a good deal of truth in what Jerry said; she was only a new-comer, with scarcely a real right to enter the lists. And it was true too that she was free to retire without vexing any one, or involving others in her self-sacrifice. Lady Mildred would not care; her parents would, not improbably, take this boy’s view of the case. Self-sacrifice was the only one involved.
She turned and looked at Charlotte’s brother.
“Very well,” she said, “I promise to do as you wish. I cannot yet quite see how I shall manage it. You will not of course blame me if I find I cannot. I do promise you to do my best to get out of it, so that Charlotte shall have no rivals but her regular ones.”
Jerry looked up at her.
“Thank you,” he said, “thank you awfully. You are very good and—and kind. I wish Charlotte could know; but of course she never must. You’ll never tell anybody, will you?” he added.
“I’ll never tell any one by whom it could possibly come round to Charlotte,” she said. “And for some time to come I’ll not tell any one at all.”
“I’ll trust you,” said Jerry. “Now I must go. Oh but would you like me to walk up to the house with you?” he went on, with a sudden recollection of his “manners.”
“No, thank you,” said Claudia, secretly amused, for Jerry, though only three years younger, was about half her size; “oh no, thank you. You must get home as fast as you can.”