can’t understand properly. You will when
you’re grown up. Surely that’s quite
enough for you to understand at present.... How
can a woman live if she doesn’t marry, stupid?
She must have money to live and it is men who have
the money.... Well, of course they do because
they earn it; look at Harold; and Robert will have
money when he’s a little older.... Well,
how can women? Now, I said that’s enough
and it is enough.”
It was enough and most satisfactorily enough for one
purpose. It was the first explanation of men
as a race apart from women that Rosalie had ever received
and it precisely bore out all that she had conceived
about them. It affirmed her perception of the
wonder and greatness of men as compared with women.
It intensified that perception.
Wonderful men! Marvellous and most fortunate
men!
And then the chain of most startling upheavals began.
Father wrote to Uncle Tom in India. Father wrote
to Aunt Belle, Mrs. Pyke Pounce, in London. What
he wrote was not to be known by Rosalie, outside the
rectory wheel. The others knew, for father, with
enormous pride at his wonderful epistolatory style
in his voice, was heard reading the letter to them.
But the others, of course, knew also what Rosalie
never realised, the grinding poverty of the rectory.
She knew no other life than the herrings, the makeshifts,
and the general shabbiness of the rectory. It
was not till long afterwards that, looking back, she
realised the pinching and the screwing that served—almost—to
make ends meet.
So father wrote. India was far, London was near.
Aunt Belle’s reply came while the letter to
Uncle Tom was still upon the sea. Such a reply!
Wonderful father to win such a reply from Aunt Belle!
“You see what it is to be able to write a telling
and forceful letter!” cried father. Such
an exciting reply! Aunt Belle was coming on a
visit “to talk it over and see what she could
do.”
Aunt Belle came.
Oh, a red carpet, a red carpet for Aunt Belle, Mrs.
Pyke Pounce, to come into the story! And if at
the end of the red carpet there could be an “At
Home” in the splendid drawing-room of Aunt Belle,
Mrs. Pyke Pounce, at Pilchester Square, Notting Hill,
an At Home with about sixty-five ladies crammed into
it, all of them wives of most successful and well-off
men, mostly retired from the Indian Army and the Indian
Civil Service, and all of them chattering ecstatically,
and nibbling, and pluming themselves, and tinkling
their teacups, and Aunt Belle, Mrs. Pyke Pounce, enthroned
in their midst, and owning everything and seeming
to own her five and sixty guests, and chattering and
nibbling and pluming and tinkling more ecstatically
than any; and then if there could come into them beautiful
cousin Laetitia (when about fifteen) with sleek black
hair beautifully ribboned behind, and with pale, fine
brow, and wearing the sweetest white frock, and if
