May and Clare, girls of no imagination, saw only the drama that they might extract for themselves out of the affair.

They knew what school was like, especially at first--John was going to be utterly wretched, miserably homesick, bullied, kept in over horrible sums and impossible Latin exercises, ill-fed, and trodden upon at games.

They did not really believe these things--they knew that their brother, Tom, had always had a most pleasant time, and John was precisely the type of boy who would prosper at school, but they indulged, just for this fortnight, their romantic sentiment, never alluded in speech to school and its terrors, but by their pitying avoidance of the subject filled the atmosphere with their agitation.
They were working things for John--May, handkerchiefs, and Clare, a comforter; their voices were soft and charged with omens, their eyes were bright with the drama of the event, as though they had been supporting some young Christian relation before his encounter with the lions.

John hated more and more and more.
But more terrible to him than his sisters was his mother.

He was too young to understand what his departure meant to her, but he knew that there was something real here that needed comforting.