CHAPTER IV





The very great difference between her father and her mother
maintained in Rosalie that early perception of the wondrousness of
her father. She loved her mother, but in the atmosphere surrounding
her mother there was often flurry and worry and there was nothing
whatever in her mother to mystify and entrance by sudden and violent
eruptions of the miraculous. She did not love her father for he
was entirely too remote and awe-ful for love, but he entranced her
with his marvellousness. This maintained in her also her perception
of the altogether greater superiority of all males over all females.

Rosalie came into her family rather like a new little girl first
entering a boarding school. When she was about four, and first
beginning to realise herself, the next in age to her was Robert,
who not only was at the immense distance of ten, but was of the
male sex and therefore had a controlling interest in the world. Then
was Hilda who was twelve, then Flora fourteen, then Anna towering
away in sixteen, and then Harold utterly removed in the enormous
heights of eighteen, second only to Rosalie's father in ownership
of the world and often awfully disputing that supreme ownership.

So they were all immeasurably older than Rosalie; and they were
not only immeasurably older but, which counted for much more, they