Wonderful though Robert was, she felt somehow rather glad when at last he went. And just the same with Harold. At supper one night, Rosalie’s father not being present, Harold talked and talked and talked about a call he had paid at the house of some ladies in Ashborough. Wonderful Harold, to pay a call all by himself! It appeared that he had been the only man there, and when Rosalie’s mother said, “I wonder you didn’t feel shy, Harold,” he said with a funny sort of “Haw” sound in his voice, “Not in the least. Haw! Why on earth should I feel shy? Haw.” He had evidently very much entertained the party. The more he talked about it the more Rosalie noticed the funny “Haw.” “They must have been very glad you came,” Rosalie’s mother said. Harold put the first and second fingers of his right hand on his collar and gave it a pull up. “I rather--haw--think they were,” Harold said. “Haw.” Rosalie gave that blink. Years afterwards, when she was grown up, a grown man boastfully said something in her presence, and in a flash were recalled father dissecting a herring, Robert holding his breath till he nearly burst, Harold hitching up his collar and with the “haw” sound saying, “I rather think they were.” In a flash those childhood scenes, and instantly with them interpretation of the funny feeling and the blink that they had caused: they had been the rooting in her of a new perception added to the impregnably rooted impression of the wonder and power of men,--the perception that men knew they were wonderful and powerful and liked to show off how wonderful and powerful they were. They were superior creatures but they were apt to be rather make-you-blinky creatures; that was the new perception. On the day after her eighth birthday, the birthday itself being a treat and a holiday, Rosalie began to do lessons with Hilda. Hilda, at sixteen, had “finished her education” as had Anna and Flora at the same age. Harold, who had been a boarder at a Grammar School, had stayed there till he was eighteen; and Robert, ultimately, continued at Helmsbury Grammar School till he was eighteen. It was apparent--and it was another manifestation of the greater importance of males--that boys had more education to finish, or were permitted longer to finish it, than girls.