CHAPTER V
The lessons with Hilda period lasted till Rosalie was twelve. “Take her off your mother’s hands. That’s what you’ve left school for,” was her father’s instruction to Hilda; and so there was Rosalie, put out from her mother’s knee to the schoolroom like a small new ship out from the haven to the bay; and there was that small mind of hers come in to the company of Hilda and of Flora and of Anna with the obsession that men were infinitely more important and much more wonderful than women. She knew now that the world did not belong to men in the literal sense, but belonged, as her mother had instructed her, to God; but she knew with the abundant evidence of all that went on about her that everything in the world was done for men and that women were largely occupied in doing it; and she knew, from the same testimony, that men were much more interesting to watch than women, rather in the way that dogs were much more interesting than cats. Men, like dogs, were much more satisfactory: that was it. Her mind was throwing out feelers towards the wonders of the world and this was the feeler that was most developed. She came to her sisters very highly sensitive to the difference between men and women. And her sisters showed her the difference.
Anna was twenty then. Anna had “finished her education” four years ago. She had left school “to help your mother in the house”; and when Flora, two years later, finished her education and left school for the same purpose, she found Anna grooved in the business of helping her mother in the house and she was not in the least anxious to help Anna out of the grooves and herself become imbedded in them.
This annoyed Anna.
Rosalie used to hear Anna say to Flora a dozen times a day, “I really don’t see why you should be the one to do nothing but amuse yourself all day long. I really don’t.”
Flora used to say, “Well, you’ve always done it”—whatever the duty in dispute might be—“so why on earth should I?”
Then either Anna’s face would give a twitch and she would walk out of the room, or her face would get very red and there would be a row.
Or sometimes Flora to Anna’s “I really don’t see why—” would say enticingly, “Don’t you?”
“No, I don’t.”