of marriage and procreation completely satisfied Anna at sixteen
and Harold in the Bank at eighteen. She never gave them any other
explanation of the phenomenon of birth; and it is to be supposed
that, just as she instructed them that God sent the dear little
children, so she believed that God, at the right time, in some
mysterious way, communicated the matter to them in greater detail.
Years and years afterwards, Flora told Rosalie that when Rosalie
was born all the children were sent away to stay with a neighbour
and not allowed to return till Rosalie's mother, downstairs, was
able to show them the dear little sister that God had surprisingly
delivered at the house, as it were in a parcel.

One is given pain by a state of affairs so monstrous; but one suffers
that pain proudly because one belongs, proudly, to a day in which
nothing but stark truth may go from mother to child, not even fairy
stories, not even Bible stories. Rosalie's mother is gone and her
kind is no more, and in the graces and the manners of this day's
generation one perceives, proudly, the inestimable benefits of
the passing of her kind. Lamentable specimen of her kind, she had
no interests other than her home and her husband and her children
and the pleasures and the treasures and the friends of her husband
and her children. She belonged to that dark age when duty towards
others was the guiding principle of moral life; she came only to
the threshold of this enlightened age in which duty to oneself is
known to be the paramount and first and last consideration of life
as it should be lived.

Rosalie's mother, whose name had been Anna Escott, kept at the
bottom of a drawer five most exquisite little miniatures. They were
in a case of faded blue plush, and they had been in that case and