But it was very difficult to go on while they whispered and laughed and it was also very troublesome to have Hilda’s most interesting explanations suddenly cut short by the entrance of Flora. Rosalie began to have the habit of saying “Oh, dear!” and going “Tchk!” with her tongue when Flora came in. Also restlessly to say “Oh, dear!” and go “Tchk!” when the whisperings and the laughing about men went on and distracted her attention while she tried to do her exercises. A new aspect of men began to grow out of this. Rosalie began to feel rather aggrieved against boys and ten. They interfered. And this went further. Just as boys and men spoilt lessons so they began to spoil walks. While Hilda attended the Miss Pockets’ school and Rosalie was taught by her mother, it was always her mother with whom Rosalie took walks. Anna “never cared to go out” and Flora, whose position in the house was more like that of Harold and Robert, did much as she liked, and “dragging Rosalie about for walks” as she expressed it, was not one of the things she liked. Rosalie therefore went out with her mother until Hilda took her off her mother’s hands, when the taking off included not only education but exercise. At the beginning, Hilda showed herself as enthusiastic and as entertaining a walker as she was teacher. She was ready for jolly scrambles through woods and over fields, she was as keen as Rosalie on damming little watercourses, and exploring woodland tracts, and other similar delights, and she had a most splendid knowledge of the names of plants and flowers and birds and insects and delighted to tell them to Rosalie. Rosalie had loved the walks with her mother, always holding her dear hand, but she loved much more, though in a different way, the walks with Hilda. Then men began, in Rosalie’s private phrase, to “ruin” the walks. First Flora took to joining the walks and she and Hilda talked and talked together and always, as it seemed, about men, and Rosalie just trailed along with them, their heads miles above hers and their conversation equally out of her reach. But even that was not so bad as it became. At least there were only her sisters and sometimes they did talk to her, or sometimes one or other would break off from their chatter and cry “Oh, poor Rosalie! We’ve not been taking the least notice of you, have we? Now, what would you like to do?” And perhaps they would run races, or perhaps explore, or perhaps tell her a story, and Rosalie’s spirits would come bursting out from their dulness and all would be splendid. Not so when on the walks men, from being talked of, began to be met.