You have perhaps been wondering, my gentle reader, what all this can possibly have to do with the pug, Yum-Yum, which belonged to a little girl named Nannie Mackenzie. Well, it really has something to do with it, as I will show you. First, because it tells you that this was the set of people to whom the Mackenzies belonged and took a pride in belonging. It is true that they had a stronger claim to belong to a city set; but you see Mrs. Mackenzie had been brought up in the bosom of the Church, and thought more of the refined society in "Upper Bohemia" than she did of all the money bags to be found east of Temple Bar! In this I think she was right; in modern London it does not do for the lion to lie down with the lamb, or for earthenware pipkins to try sailing down the stream with the iron pots. In "Upper Bohemia," owing to the haziness of her right of entry, Mrs. Mackenzie was quite an important person; in the city, owing to various circumstances--shortness of money, most of all--Mrs. Mackenzie was nowhere.
Mrs. Mackenzie had not followed the example of her father and mother with regard to the size of her family; she had only three children, two girls and a boy--Rosalind, Wilfrid, and Nannie.
At this time Nannie was only ten years old, a pretty, sweet, engaging child, with frank blue eyes and her mother's pretty trick of manner, a child who was never so happy as when she had a smart sash on with a clean white frock in readiness for any form of party that had happened to come in her way.
Wilf was different. He was a grave, quiet boy of thirteen, already working for a scholarship at St. Paul's School, and meaning to be a great man some day, and meanwhile spending all his spare hours collecting insects and gathering specimens of fern leaves together.
Above Wilf was Rosalind, and Rosalind was sixteen, a tall, willowy slip of a girl, with a pair of fine eyes and a passion for art. I do not mean a passion for making the woodenly accurate drawings with stodgy clouds and woolly trees which had satisfied her mother's soul and made her so eminently competent to criticise the work of other folk--no, not that, but a real passion for real art.
Now the two Mackenzie girls had had a governess for several years, a mildly amiable young lady of the same class, and possessed of about the same amount of knowledge as Mrs. Mackenzie herself had been. She too made wooden drawings with stodgy clouds and woolly trees, and she painted flowers--such flowers as made Rosalind's artistic soul rise within her and loathe Miss Temple and all her works, nay, sometimes loathe even those good qualities which were her chiefest charm.