Kind, wise, simple, effective, easy. Rosalie
in her childish misdemeanours would have been prevailed
upon by the unhappiness her conduct caused her mother.
All wrong! A faulty process of reasoning; indeed
not a process of reasoning at all: a crude appeal
to the emotions. Those three children who on
the one part never saw their mother sad and were constrained
to comfort her, on the other never were bribed to
good behaviour by the thought of grieving her.
They only associated happiness with her and they enjoyed
happiness simply by reasoning away unhappiness.
Kind, wise, simple, effective, easy.
Happy Huggo, happy Doda, happy Benji, happy Rosalie!
It has been said of Time, earlier in these pages,
the cloak-and-dagger sort he is, that stalks and pounces.
One seeks only to record him when he thus assails,
and there is this result; that it is necessary to
pare away so much. In instance, there’s
to be inserted now a note on Rosalie’s advance
in her career. It’s cut to nothing.
This is because all that career ultimately was known
to her never to have really mattered. And so
with other things. That girl, all through, pressing
so strong ahead, rises to the eye not cumbered with
other importance than her own. There might be
asked for (by a reader) presentation of Harry’s
parents; of what was doing all this time to her own
parents in the rectory, to Harold, Robert, Flora, Hilda;
of friends that Rosalie and Harry had. That girl’s
passage is not traced in such. Whose is?
The chart where such are marked is just a common public
print, stamped for the public eye. They’re
not set down upon that secret chart all carry in the
cabin of their soul, and there, in that so hidden
and inviolable stateroom, poring over it by the uncertain
swinging lamp of conscience, prick out their way.
Her installation in the bank had been a notable success.
She dealt with all the insurance advice and with income-tax
advice and business; and it was remarkable to her,
at first, how many of Field’s clients were as
children in the mysteries of income tax, and as children
alike in their ignorance of the possibilities of life
insurance and in their pleasure at the discoveries
she set before them. But further than this (and
more important, said Mr. Sturgiss and Mr. Field) was
the quick response of the clients to the various domestic
advice that it was Rosalie’s business to give.
Husbands and wives from the East, or returned thither
from London and writing from the East, consulted her
on innumerable matters. When, in instance, an
army officer wrote to her from India, very diffidently
wondering if she could help him in the matter of some
Christmas presents for his wife and children at home,
Mr. Sturgiss was uncommonly pleased.
“I knew it!” said Mr. Sturgiss. “That’s
the kind of thing. You watch how side-lines like
that will develop. That’s what these people
want—some one at home they can rely on.
I tell you, Mrs. Occleve, you, that is to say your
department of Field’s, is what the Anglo-Eastern
has been wanting ever since Clive and Warren Hastings
went out—a link with home. You see.”
