“You are hounded out, as you elegantly express it, because morning after morning, owing to your disgustingly slothful habits, you clash with me, sir. My breakfast is delayed because you clash with me, and the house is delayed because you clash with me, and the whole parish is delayed because you clash with me.”
“Perhaps you’re not aware that Robert clashes with me.”
“Dash Robert! Are you going or are you not going?”
Rosalie’s father gives a tug at the bell cord that would have dislocated the neck of a horse. The cord comes away in his hand. He hurls it across the room.
There was a most frightful storm one night and Rosalie, in Anna’s bed with Flora crowded in also and Hilda shivering in her nightgown beside them, too young to be frightened but with her sister’s fright beginning to communicate itself to her, said, “Ask father to go and stop it.”
“Fool!” cried Flora. “How could father stop the storm?”
Flora’s sharp and astounding reply to that question of Rosalie’s was recalled by Rosalie, with hurt surprise at Flora’s sharpness and ignorance, when, shortly afterwards, she found in a book a man who could, and actually did, stop a storm. This was a man called Prospero in a book called “The Tempest.”
She was never--that Rosalie--the conventional wonder-child of fiction who reads before ten all that its author probably never read before thirty; but she could read when she was six and she read widely and curiously, choosing her entertainment, from her father’s bookshelves, solely by the method of reading every book that had pictures.
There was but one picture to “The Tempest,” a frontispiece, but it sufficed, and at the period when Rosalie believed the ownership of the world to be vested in her father and under him in all males, “The Tempest,” because it reflected that condition, was the greatest joy of all the joys the bookshelves discovered to her. She read it over and over again. It presented life exactly as life presented itself to the round eyes of Rosalie: all males doing always noisy and violent and important and enthralling things, with Prospero, her father, by far the most important of all; and women scarcely appearing and doing only what the men told them to do. Miranda’s appearances in the story were indifferently skipped by Rosalie; the noisy action and language in the wreck, and the noisy action and language of the drunkards in the wood were what she liked, and all the magic arts of Prospero were what she thoroughly appreciated and understood. That was life as she knew it.