This Freedom

Rosalie’s earliest apprehension of the world was of a mysterious and extraordinary world that revolved entirely about her father and that entirely and completely belonged to her...

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 fo...

The Aubyn family occupied only a portion of the enormous rectory. There was a whole floor upstairs, and there were several rooms on the ground and first floors, that were never...

The very great difference between her father and her mother maintained in Rosalie that early perception of the wondrousness of her father. She loved her mother, but in the atmos...

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...

Oh, a red carpet, a red carpet for Aunt Belle, Mrs. Pyke Pounce, to come into the story! And if at the end of the red carpet there could be an “At Home” in the splendid drawing-...

Next, in its turn, and exactly a fortnight before the beginning of the term at which Rosalie was to join the boarding school in London, came the letter from Uncle Tom in India,...

This is an elementary principle of the frailty of human nature, and knowledge of it, and experience of its mighty truth, used to cause, during the three holiday periods of the y...

One seeks to give only the things in Rosalie’s life that contributed to her record, as time judges a record. Of her years at Oakwood House, so far as Oakwood House itself is con...

Incredibly soon, so stealthy swift is time, came this last term of Rosalie’s at the Sultana’s. Time does not play an open game. It’s of the cloak and dagger sort. It stalks and...

She’s left the splendid house in Pilchester Square! She’s living an independent life! She’s going to Mr. Simcox’s office, her office, every day, just like a man! She’s living on...

There’s much virtue in an If, says Touchstone; and there’s much virtue in an “Oh”--a wise, a thoughtful, a speculative, a discerning “Oh” such as that “Oh” pronounced by Rosalie...

There was a thing she said about men once (in the boarding house now) and often repeated. “They’re very fond of saying women are cats,” she once said. “Fools! It’s men that are...

This was the astounding opening of an astounding letter, pages and pages, to Rosalie from Miss Salmon. Pages and pages, having the appearance, each one, of a battlefield or of a...

Sne cried. Her sympathies, though drying and slower now to be aroused, still then were such that she could weep for pity. It is a glimpse of her not to be seen again. There was...

But this was not to continue. Keggo began to lapse; Rosalie began to weary of helping Keggo. She had herself to think of. Those who go down in life, whether by age or by misfort...

She had not good health in the week immediately following that great day. She did not feel well. She did not look very well. Mr. Simcox, profoundly sympathetic to every mood of...

That dinner! That after-dinner in the drawing-room upstairs! It is a nightmare to be imagined, not to be described. Imagine walking from the darkness and the frightful secret of...

There’s none so sick as, brought to bed, that robust he that ever has scorned sickness; nor any sinner like a saint suddenly gone from saintliness to sin; and there can be no lo...

She loved him so! On that first day together in the park she told him everything about herself, about all her ideas and theories and principles, particularly where these touched...

Harry assured her! Harry convinced her! Harry was here upon the battlements, come with her in her retirement, joined with her as her ally. All her ideas were his ideas. He, too,...

That’s all done. The thing traverses the waters of the years, as across seas a ship, and makes presently a new shore, a new clime, wherein are met occasions new and strange, not...

If she were taken (for a moment) when she had been married ten years, her age thirty-two, and then taken again when she was forty-six, when she had done, when, in 1922, she said...

There were attendant upon the expectation and the coming of Benji certain processes of mind that had not been with Huggo or with Doda. When it was in prospect she had vexation,...

Those children were brought up with every modern advantage. Wisdom is judged by the age in which it flourishes, and everything that the day accounts wise for children those chil...

It has been said of Time, earlier in these pages, the cloak-and-dagger sort he is, that stalks and pounces. One seeks only to record him when he thus assails, and there is this...

He had called it the principle. She watched him. That attitude in which he sat was of a profundity of meditation not to be looked upon without that sense of awe, of oppression,...

There is a state wherein the mind, normally the court of pleas where reason receives and administers the supplications of the senses, is not in session. Reason is sick, suspends...

That happened in the Christmas holidays, in January. In February was Doda’s eleventh birthday. The child had friends rather older than herself, neighbours, who for a year had be...

The thing goes now at a most frightful pace for Rosalie. One hates the slow, laborious written word that tries to show it. There needs a pen with wings or that by leaping violen...

Her Doda! The one that was her baby girl, that was her tiny daughter! The one that was to be her woman treasury in which she’d pour her woman love; that was to be her self’s own...

In the Book of Job it all happened, to Job, in the apparent compass of one piece of time not broken by diurnal intervals, not mitigated by recuperative cessations between blow a...