Seated on the sun-baked floor, book on knee, the noises of the high road floating up to her, distance-dulled and soothing, she would shake her thick hair across her face, and see through its veil a melting, shifting shadow of a hand that helped to turn her pages. The warm floor was a soft lap; the battered trunk a shoulder that supported; the faint breeze a kiss upon her lips. The fantastic qualities the mother had bequeathed, recreated her in the mind of her child, bringing vague comfort (who knows?) alike to the dead and the living Louise.
Yet the impalpable intercourse, compact of make-believe and yearnings, was, at its sweetest, no safe substitute for the human companionships that were lacking in the life of Louise. Half consciously she desired an elder sister, a friend, on whom to lavish the stores of her ardent, reticent nature.
At twelve she was sent to school. At first it did little for her. She was unaccustomed to companions of her own age and sex and, quite simply, did not know how to make friends with many who would have been willing enough, if she could have contributed her share, the small change of joke and quarrel and confidence, towards intimacy. But Louise was too inured to the solitude of crowds to be troubled by her continued loneliness. She met the complaints of Mrs. Denny, that she made no friends like other children, with a shrug of resignation. What could she do? She supposed that she was not nice enough; people didn't like her.
Secretly her step-mother agreed. She was kind to Louise, but she, too, did not like her. She found her irritating. Her dreamy, absent manner, her very docility and absence of self-assertion were annoying to a hearty woman who was braced rather than distressed by an occasional battle of wills. She thought her shyness foolish, doubted the insincerity of her humility, and looked upon her shrinking from publicity, noise and rough caresses, her love of books and solitude, as a morbid pose. Yet she was just a woman and did not let the child guess at her dislike, though she made no pretence of actual affection. She knew perfectly well that Louise's mother (they had been schoolgirls together), had irritated her in exactly the same way.