Rosalie thought at first this was a plaintive question
directly from the Miss Pockets in their capacity as
school-teachers and therefore as licensed makers of
reports; but immediately afterwards saw “Isaiah”
printed under it in discreet characters—
“Who Hath Believed our Report?
—Isaiah.”
and concluded that it was Isaiah who had believed
it. On the back was written in the tall, thin
handwriting of the Miss Pockets, “To our dear
little pupil Rosalie, on her eighth birthday, from
Agnes and Lydia Pocket.”
In the afternoon, the Miss Pockets called at the rectory
and there was evidently some high mystery about their
visit. Rosalie was in the study looking for a
drawing pin wherewith to affix her illuminated card
to the wall. Hilda ran in. “The Miss
Pockets. Where’s father? Come out,”
and Rosalie was hurriedly run out and shut into the
dining-room, leaving the vindication of Isaiah in the
matter of the report on the table. Opening the
door to a chink, Rosalie saw the Miss Pockets, shivering,
the permanent decoration on the nose of the elder
Miss Pocket very conspicuous and agitatedly swinging,
ushered into the study, and presently her father follow
his jutty nose into the study after them, and very
shortly after that the Miss Pockets driven out as
it were by the jutty nose and looking thinner and
colder than ever before. Miss Lydia Pocket, who
had lost the appendage to her nose and looked curiously
undressed and indelicate without it, was saying feebly,
“But it was understood. We always thought
it was understood.”
They shuddered away; and when Rosalie went into the
study immediately afterwards to recover her card,
there was upon the word Isaiah, as though somebody
had literally thrown doubt upon his belief of the
report, a large damp spot.
On the following day, Rosalie began lessons with Hilda.
The lessons with Hilda period lasted till Rosalie
was twelve. “Take her off your mother’s
hands. That’s what you’ve left school
for,” was her father’s instruction to
Hilda; and so there was Rosalie, put out from her
mother’s knee to the schoolroom like a small
new ship out from the haven to the bay; and there
was that small mind of hers come in to the company
of Hilda and of Flora and of Anna with the obsession
that men were infinitely more important and much more
wonderful than women. She knew now that the world
did not belong to men in the literal sense, but belonged,
as her mother had instructed her, to God; but she
knew with the abundant evidence of all that went on
about her that everything in the world was done for
men and that women were largely occupied in doing it;
and she knew, from the same testimony, that men were
much more interesting to watch than women, rather
in the way that dogs were much more interesting than
cats. Men, like dogs, were much more satisfactory:
that was it. Her mind was throwing out feelers
towards the wonders of the world and this was the
feeler that was most developed. She came to her
sisters very highly sensitive to the difference between
men and women. And her sisters showed her the
difference.
