Anne of Windy Poplars - L. M. Montgomery [13]
In spite of the fact that she has apparently no trouble in making them toe the line she is constantly sending some of them up to me, especially Pringles. I know she does it purposely, and I feel miserably certain that she exults in my difficulties, and would be glad to see me worsted.
Rebecca Dew says that no one can make friends with her. The widows have invited her several times to Sunday supper – the dear souls are always doing that for lonely people and always have the most delicious chicken salad for them – but she never came. So they have given it up, because, as Aunt Kate says, ‘There are limits.’
There are rumours that she is very clever, and can sing and recite – ‘elocute’, á la Rebecca Dew – but will not do either. Aunt Chatty once asked her to recite at a church supper.
‘We thought she refused very ungraciously,’ said Aunt Kate.
‘Just growled,’ said Rebecca Dew.
Katherine has a deep, throaty voice, almost a man’s voice, and it does sound like a growl when she isn’t in a good humour.
She isn’t pretty, but she might make more of herself. She is dark and swarthy, with magnificent black hair always dragged back from her high forehead and coiled in a clumsy knot at the base of her neck. Her eyes don’t match her hair, being a clear, light amber under her black brows. She has ears she needn’t be ashamed to show and the most beautiful hands I’ve ever seen. Also, she has a well-cut mouth. But she dresses terribly. Seems to have a positive genius for getting the colours and lines she should not wear. Dull dark greens and drab greys, when she is too sallow for greens and greys, and stripes which make her tall, lean figure even taller and leaner. And her clothes always look as if she’d slept in them.
Her manner is very repellent. As Rebecca Dew would say, she always has a chip on her shoulder. Every time I pass her on the stairs I feel that she is thinking horrid things about me. Every time I speak to her she makes me feel I’ve said the wrong thing. And yet I’m very sorry for her, though I know she would resent my pity furiously. And I can’t do anything to help her, because she doesn’t want to be helped. She is really hateful to me. One day, when we three teachers were all in the staff room, I did something which, it seems, transgressed one of the unwritten laws of the school, and Katherine said cuttingly, ‘Perhaps you think you are above rules, Miss Shirley.’ At another time, when I was suggesting some changes which I thought would be for the good of the school, she said, with a scornful smile, ‘I am not interested in fairytales.’ Once, when I said some nice things about her work and methods, she said, ‘And what is to be the pill in all this jam?’
But the thing that annoyed me most… Well, one day when I happened to pick up a book of hers in the staff room and glance at the flyleaf I said, ‘I’m glad you spell your name with a K. Katherine is so much more alluring than Catherine, just as K is ever so much more a gipsier letter than smug C.’
She made no response, but the next note she sent up was signed ‘Catherine Brooke’
I sneezed all the way home.
I really would give up trying to be friends with her if I hadn’t a queer, unaccountable feeling that under all her brusqueness and aloofness she is actually starved for companionship.
Altogether, what with Katherine’s antagonism and the Pringle attitude, I don’t know just what I’d do if it wasn’t for dear Rebecca Dew and your letters – and little Elizabeth.
Because I’ve got acquainted with little Elizabeth. And she is a darling.
Three nights ago I took the glass of milk to the wall door, and little Elizabeth herself was there to get it instead of the Woman, her head just coming above the solid part of the door, so that her face was framed in the ivy. She is small, pale, golden, and wistful. Her eyes, looking at me through the autumn twilight, are large and golden-hazel. Her silver-gold hair was parted in the middle, sleeked plainly down over