Honor doesn’t like going to school and uses her vivid imagination to describe all the reasons she doesn’t like it. At the end of the book Honor is sad because although she doesn’t have to go to school anymore, she still says she’ll miss it.
“He was very fond of animals and kept many kinds of pets. Besides the gold-fish in the pond at the bottom of his garden, he had rabbits in the pantry, white mice in his piano, a squirrel in the linen closet and a hedgehog in the cellar.”
“That’s one of those gerbil-things,′ Mrs Sparrow said in the voice of a sleepwalker. The gerbil seemed not to like her tone, for it withdrew into the tube again. Meanwhile, another gerbil sat up on its hind-legs behind another tube, on which it rested one front paw, as if to begin public speaking. It held its other paw against its white shirt-front.”
“You do not have to like them nor do you have to be like them. Always keep one thing in mind, and that is, a Cathy never have to like or be like or act like anybody in the world besides a Cathy.”
″‘I like you, Ma.’
‘You and them hounds and all the rest o’ the stock,′ she said. ‘Mighty lovin’ on an empty belly and me with a dish in my hand.′
‘That’s the way you’re purtiest,’ he said, and grinned.”