Our lessons with Major Buller, and the influence of Miss Airlie's good breeding and straightforward kindness, gave a healthier turn to our tastes; but when Miss Airlie went away and Major Buller proclaimed a three weeks' holiday from the Latin grammar, and we were left to ourselves, Matilda felt the want of the flattery, the patronage, and the small excitements and mysteries about nothing, to which Miss Perry had accustomed her.

I blush to think that my companionship was less comfort to her than it ought to have been.

As to Aunt Theresa, she was always too busy to give full attention to anything; and this does not invite confidence.
Another reason, I am sure, for Matilda's dislike to appearing in company was a painful sense of her personal appearance; and as she had heard Aunt Theresa and her friends discuss, approve, and condemn their friends by the standard of appearances alone, ever since she was old enough to overhear company conversation, I hardly think she was much to blame on this point.
Matilda was emphatically at what is called "an awkward age"; an age more awkward with some girls than with others.

I wish grown-up ladies, who mean to be kind to their friends' daughters, would try to remember the awkwardness of it, and not increase a naturally uncomfortable self-consciousness by personal remarks which might disturb the composure of older, prettier, and better-dressed people.

It is bad enough to be quite well aware that the size of one's hands and feet prematurely foreshadow the future growth of one's figure; that these are the more prominent because the simple dresses of the unintroduced young lady seem to be perpetually receding from one's bony-wrists above, and shrinking towards the calves of one's legs below, from those thin ankles on which one is impelled to stand by turns (like a sleeping stork) through some mysterious instinct of relieving the weak and overgrown spine.
This, I say, is mortifying enough, and if modesty and good breeding carry us cheerfully through a not unfelt contrast with the assured manners and flowing draperies of Mamma's lady friends in the drawing-room, they might spare us the announcement of what it hardly needs gold eyeglasses to discover--that we really grow every day.
Blushes come heavily enough to hands and cheeks when to the shyness of youth are added the glows and chills of imperfect circulation: it does not need the stare of strangers, nor the apologies of Mamma, to stain our doubtful complexions with a deeper red.
All girls are not awkward at the awkward age.