Doda was nine when she began; Huggo, when he was home for his holidays, eleven, rising twelve; Benji only seven. They seemed to her, all of them, wonderfully old for their years and, no getting over that, different. She tried to read them the stories she used to love. They didn’t like them. Doda didn’t like “The Wide Wide World” and didn’t like “Little Women.” Huggo thought “The Swiss Family Robinson” awful rot, and argued learnedly with her how grotesque it was to imagine all that variety of animals and all that variety of plants in one same climate. “But, Huggo, you needn’t worry whether it was possible. It was just written as a means of telling a family of children natural history things. They didn’t have to believe it. They only enjoyed it. I and your uncle Robert never worried about whether it was possible; we simply loved the adventure of it.” “Well, I can’t, mother,” said Huggo. “It’s not possible, and if it isn’t possible, I think it’s stupid.” And Doda thought Ellen in the “Wide Wide World” silly, and Beth and Jo and the others in “Little Women” dull. She read them Dickens, but it was always, “Oh, leave out that part, mother. It’s dull.” And so was Scott Lamb’s “Tales from Shakespeare” never had a chance at all. They had heard from Miss Prescott, or Huggo had heard at school, that Shakespeare was a lesson. “Oh, not a thing out of lessons, mother.” What they liked were what seemed to Rosalie the crudely written stories, and the grotesque and usually rather vulgar comic drawings, in the host of cheap periodicals for children that seemed to have sprung up since her day. They called these exciting or funny and they revelled in them. They were different. Benji was no more than a baby, but he was extraordinarily devoted to Doda, liked only the things that Doda liked, and did not like the things that Doda didn’t like, or, in the language sometimes a little unpleasantly emphatic that always was Doda’s and Huggo’s, that Doda “simply loathed.” Rosalie had some old bound numbers of treasured juvenile periodicals of the rectory days. Even Benji didn’t like them. They were markedly different from the books the children did like. Their illustrations were mainly of children in domestic scenes. “Don’t they look stupid?” was Doda’s comment; and Benji, copying, thought they were stupid too.