This FreedomHutchinson, A. S. M. (Arthur Stuart-Menteth)
General
This Freedom
Hutchinson, A. S. M. (Arthur Stuart-Menteth)
Marriage -- Fiction; Women -- Social and moral questions -- Fiction
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 result; that it is necessary to
pare away so much. In instance, there’s to be inserted now a note on
Rosalie’s advance in her career. It’s cut to nothing. This is because
all that career ultimately was known to her never to have really
mattered. And so with other things. That girl, all through, pressing so
strong ahead, rises to the eye not cumbered with other importance than
her own. There might be asked for (by a reader) presentation of Harry’s
parents; of what was doing all this time to her own parents in the
rectory, to Harold, Robert, Flora, Hilda; of friends that Rosalie and
Harry had. That girl’s passage is not traced in such. Whose is? The
chart where such are marked is just a common public print, stamped for
the public eye. They’re not set down upon that secret chart all carry
in the cabin of their soul, and there, in that so hidden and inviolable
stateroom, poring over it by the uncertain swinging lamp of conscience,
prick out their way.
Her installation in the bank had been a notable success. She dealt with
all the insurance advice and with income-tax advice and business; and
it was remarkable to her, at first, how many of Field’s clients were as
children in the mysteries of income tax, and as children alike in their
ignorance of the possibilities of life insurance and in their pleasure
at the discoveries she set before them. But further than this (and more
important, said Mr. Sturgiss and Mr. Field) was the quick response
of the clients to the various domestic advice that it was Rosalie’s
business to give. Husbands and wives from the East, or returned thither
from London and writing from the East, consulted her on innumerable
matters. When, in instance, an army officer wrote to her from India,
very diffidently wondering if she could help him in the matter of some
Christmas presents for his wife and children at home, Mr. Sturgiss was
uncommonly pleased.
“I knew it!” said Mr. Sturgiss. “That’s the kind of thing. You watch how
side-lines like that will develop. That’s what these people want--some
one at home they can rely on. I tell you, Mrs. Occleve, you, that is
to say your department of Field’s, is what the Anglo-Eastern has been
wanting ever since Clive and Warren Hastings went out--a link with home.
You see.”
She did see. Mr. Field saw. The clients saw. The friends of the clients
saw--and became clients.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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