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.
Rosalind wanted to go further a-field in the art world than either her
mother’s paragraphs or Miss Temple’s copies; she wanted to join some
well-known art-class, and, giving up everything else, go in for real
hard, grinding work.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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