and out came the silvery strip known to Rosalie as "the swimming
thing" and was laid in its turn upon the bones, exactly, neatly,
as if it were a game of spillikins. "Now pepper. Plenty of pepper
for the roe, you see. There. Now."

And in about six mouthfuls father's plate would be as clean as when
it was brought in, decorated rather than marred by the exquisitely
neat pile of the backbone, the tail, the little bones, and the
silvery swimming thing. "There! Delicious! That's the way to eat
a herring"; and he would direct a glance at the plate of Rosalie's
mother. Rosalie's mother made a herring into the most frightful
mess it was possible to imagine. She spent the whole of her time in
removing bones from her mouth; and her plate, when she was half-way
though, looked to contain the mangled remains of about two dozen
herrings. "Very few women know how to eat a herring," Rosalie's
father would say.

Wonderful father! How to sharpen a pencil, how to eat a herring,
how to do up a parcel, how to undo a parcel, how to cut your finger
nails, how to sit with regard to the light when you wrote or read,
how to tie a knot, how to untie a knot. Clever father, natty father!

Yes, still enormously wonderful father; but also rather strangely
proud of being wonderful father. Rosalie now was constantly being
struck by that. It began to give her rather a funny sensation.
She couldn't describe the sensation or interpret it, but it was a
feeling, when father was glowing with pride over one of these things
he did so wonderfully well--a feeling of being rather uncomfortable,
shy, ashamed--something like that. She contracted the habit when
father beamed and glowed and looked around for applause of giving