“Different?  Show me where the difference is, please.”

“Oh, Kitty, you know.”

“But I don’t know.”

Laura’s delicate face flushed a little, but after a moment’s hesitation she said:  “Esther is—­is not like Amy Stanton or you; that is, she doesn’t live in the same way.  The Bodns are poor,—­quite poor, Kitty.”

“Well, I don’t see how that alters the case,” still obstinately responded Kitty.

“Now, Kitty, you do see.  Esther is shy and sensitive.  She doesn’t visit the people that we do.”

“She doesn’t visit anybody, so far as I know.”

“Yes, that is just it,” Laura went on eagerly; “and so you see that when she and her mother have made preparations for company—­even one person—­it would put them to a great deal of trouble and inconvenience to change the time, and it would be unkind and impolite to ask them to do it.”

“How do you know that they have made such unusual preparations for you?” asked Kitty, sarcastically.

Laura flushed again as she answered:  “I didn’t mean unusual in one way, but I thought that they didn’t often invite company by something that Esther said.  When she asked me to fix a day, she told me that her mother wasn’t very well, and that they didn’t keep a servant.”

“Not keep a servant!  Not a single one!  Why, they must be awfully poor, like common working-people!” exclaimed the young Beacon Street girl, in a wondering tone.

“Esther isn’t common, if she is poor,” Laura instantly asserted with decision.

“I don’t understand how anybody so poor as that should be sent to Miss Milwood’s school.  I shouldn’t think they could afford it,” went on Kitty; “why, the place for her is a public school.”

“But, Kitty, don’t you know that Esther assists Miss Milwood,—­that it is Esther who looks over all the French and German exercises, and makes the first corrections before mademoiselle takes them?”

“Esther Bodn?”

“Yes,—­why, Esther, you must have noticed, is very proficient in French and German.  She and her mother have lived abroad and here, in French and German families, to prepare her for being a teacher.  She has a great natural aptitude, too, for languages.”

“How in the world did you find all this out, Laura?”

“I didn’t find it out, as you call it,—­there is no secret about it,—­Esther would no doubt have told you as much, if you had got as well acquainted with her as I have.”

“I don’t see how you came to get so well acquainted with her.  She’s nice enough, but I could always see that she wasn’t like the rest of us,—­of our set.”

“Like the rest of us!  She’s just as good as the rest of us, and better than some of us.”

“Oh, I dare say,” said Kitty, in a patronizing tone.

“She may not be of our set, as you say, Kitty; but when I think of how Maud and Florence Aplin talk sometimes, I don’t feel very proud of belonging to ‘our set.’”