knew how different and how superior men were. Flora and Hilda seemed to Rosalie always to be talking about men. Flora used to come into the schoolroom while Rosalie was at her lessons and talk to Hilda. Rosalie was very fond of her lessons and Hilda was an uncommonly good teacher and took a great interest in leading Rosalie along the paths she had herself so recently followed. But directly Flora came in, Hilda’s interest was entirely diverted to what Flora had to say and to what she had to say to Flora, and it was always about men—boys or men. Rosalie would at once be put to learning passages or working out exercises and Flora and Hilda would go over to the window and talk. They talked mostly in whispers with their heads close together; they laughed a good deal; they showed one another letters. Often they came over to the table and wrote letters. And they used to look up from their whisperings and say, “Go on with your lessons, Rosalie.”
But it was very difficult to go on while they whispered and laughed and it was also very troublesome to have Hilda’s most interesting explanations suddenly cut short by the entrance of Flora. Rosalie began to have the habit of saying “Oh, dear!” and going “Tchk!” with her tongue when Flora came in. Also restlessly to say “Oh, dear!” and go “Tchk!” when the whisperings and the laughing about men went on and distracted her attention while she tried to do her exercises.
A new aspect of men began to grow out of this. Rosalie began to feel rather aggrieved against boys and ten. They interfered.
And this went further. Just as boys and men spoilt lessons so they began to spoil walks. While Hilda attended the Miss Pockets’ school and Rosalie was taught by her mother, it was always her mother with whom Rosalie took walks. Anna “never cared to go out” and Flora, whose position in the house was more like that of Harold and Robert, did much as she liked, and “dragging Rosalie about for walks” as she expressed it, was not one of the things she liked. Rosalie therefore went out with her mother until Hilda took her off her mother’s hands, when the taking off included not only education but exercise. At the beginning, Hilda showed herself as enthusiastic and as entertaining a walker as she was teacher. She was ready for jolly scrambles through woods and over fields, she was as keen as Rosalie on damming little watercourses, and exploring woodland tracts, and other similar delights, and she had a most splendid knowledge of the names of plants and flowers and birds and insects and delighted to tell them to Rosalie. Rosalie had loved the walks with her mother, always holding her dear hand, but she loved much more, though in a different way, the walks with Hilda.
Then men began, in Rosalie’s private phrase, to “ruin” the walks.
First Flora took to joining the walks and she and Hilda talked and talked together and always, as it seemed, about men, and Rosalie just trailed along with them, their heads miles above hers and their conversation equally out of her reach. But even that was not so bad as it became. At least there were only her sisters and sometimes they did talk to her, or sometimes one or other would break off from their chatter and cry “Oh, poor Rosalie! We’ve not been taking the least notice of you, have we? Now, what would you like to do?” And perhaps they would run races, or perhaps explore, or perhaps tell her a story, and Rosalie’s spirits would come bursting out from their dulness and all would be splendid.
Not so when on the walks men, from being talked of, began to be met.
There were at Robert’s Grammar School certain young men who were in no way connected with the school but were the “private pupils” of the headmaster and were reading for the universities. One day Hilda started for the walk in her church hat and Flora also in her church hat and her church gloves. They walked very fast; Rosalie could hardly keep up. And then at a corner of a lane they suddenly started to walk very slowly indeed, and suddenly again at a stile, two of these young men were met.
The young men raised their hats much farther than Rosalie had ever seen a man raise his hat and one of them said, “Well, you have come then?”
Flora said, “Well, we just happened to be strolling along this way.” Then she said, “You needn’t imagine we came to see you!” which Rosalie thought very rude; but the young men seemed to like it and all of them laughed a great deal.
Presently they all started to walk together, Hilda and Flora in the middle and one of the young men on either side. The walk lasted much later than the walks usually lasted and the whole way Rosalie trailed along behind; and on the whole afternoon the only words addressed to Rosalie by her sisters came just as, the young men hav-ing taken their leave a mile away, they were turning in at the rectory gate. Flora then said, “Rosalie, darling, don’t tell mother or father or any one that we met any one.” And Hilda said, “Yes, remember, Rosalie, you’re not to say anything about that.”
After that, the young men were met, and the four walked, and Rosalie trailed, nearly every day.
One of these young men was called Mr. Chalton and the other Mr. Ricks. Like all men, and even more so, they were splendid and wonderful. They had silver cigarette cases and smoked a lot, and they wore most handsome waistcoats and ties, and some of their conversation that came back to Rosalie, trailing behind, was of very wonderful and exciting things they had done or were going to do. Mr. Holland, the headmaster of the Grammar School, was the terror of Robert’s life, but it appeared that Mr. Chalton and Mr. Ricks were not in the least afraid of Mr. Holland, and they talked a great deal of what they would do to him if he ever tried to interfere with them and a great deal of what they did do in the way of utterly disregarding him. They were undeniably splendid and wonderful, but they utterly ruined Rosalie’s walks and they greatly intensified Rosalie’s new feelings towards men and boys—that men and boys were a great nuisance and spoilt things.
Time went along. Other young men were met. In the holidays, quite a number of young men came for their vacations to their homes in Ibbotsfield and the surrounding district. Certain of these, unlike the Grammar School private pupils, called openly at the rectory on one pretext or another, but they were nevertheless also met secretly by Flora and Hilda, ruined the walks precisely as Messrs. Chalton and Ricks had first ruined them, and were on no account to be mentioned by Rosalie to her father or mother.
The reason for this secrecy was never explained to Rosalie and the secrecy oppressed Rosalie. It took not only the form of being a thing she was not able to tell to her mother, and Rosalie was in the habit of telling everything she did to her mother, but it took also the form of mysterious and vaguely alarming perils during the walks. An immense watchfulness was kept up against chance encounters with people. One of the party would often cry, “Look! Who’s this?” and the young men would separate from the girls and appear as if they were walking by themselves. Sometimes they would break right away and run off and not be met again. Very often Rosalie would be sent on ahead to a turning and told to come back at once if anybody was to be seen and then would be examined as to who the person was. Sometimes she was posted to keep watch while the girls and the young men slipped off somewhere, over a gate or into a barn. She got to know by sometimes rushing in with warnings that Flora and Hilda on these occasions smoked the young men’s cigarettes. Then when they got home, they would rush up to their room and wash their teeth and put scent on themselves. And invariably when the young men took their leave at the end of a walk there would be long and close whisperings in which were always to be heard the words, “Well, say you were—” or “Look here, we’ll say we were—” and generally, “Go away, Rosalie. There’s nothing for you to listen to.”
It all had the effect of making Rosalie feel unhappy and rather frightened. She sometimes asked, “Why mustn’t I say anything to mother?” She was always told, and only told, “Because father doesn’t like us meeting men.”
No reason why father should not like them meeting men was ever given, and Rosalie, ceaselessly disturbed by the concealment, could never imagine what the reason could be. There could be no reason that she could imagine; and she was thus immensely taken aback when one evening at supper her father made a most surprising
