came ballooning along towards Rosalie, not running as ordinarily
fit and efficient men run, but progressing by a series of enormous
leaps and bounds, arms and legs spread-eagling, and at each leap
and bound always seeming to Rosalie to spring as high in the air
as he sprung forward over the ground. It would not have surprised
Rosalie, who was then about four, to see one of these stupendous
leaps continue in a whirling flight through mid-air and her father
come hurtling over the gate and drop with an enormous plunk at
her feet like a huge dead bird, as a partridge once had come plunk
over the hedge and out of the sky when she was in a lane adjacent
to a shooting party. It would not have surprised her in the least.
Nothing her father did ever surprised Rosalie. The world was his
and the fulness thereof, and he did what he liked with it.

Arrived, however, from the bull, not as a ballooning bird out of the
sky, but as a headlong avalanche over the gate, Rosalie's father
tottered to a felled tree trunk, and sat there heaving, and groaned
aloud, "Infernal parish; hateful parish; forsaken parish!"

Rosalie, wonderingly regarding him, said, "Mother says dinner is
waiting for you, father."

Her mother and her sisters and the servants and the entire female
establishment of the universe seemed to Rosalie always to be
waiting for something from her father, or for her father himself,
or waiting for or upon some male other than her father. That was
another of the leading principles that Rosalie first came to know
in her world. Not only were the males, paramountly her father, able
to do what they liked and always doing wonderful and mysterious
things, but everything that the females did either had some relation