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
There was but one picture to “The Tempest,” a frontispiece, but it
sufficed, and at the period when Rosalie believed the ownership of
the world to be vested in her father and under him in all males, “The
Tempest,” because it reflected that condition, was the greatest joy of
all the joys the bookshelves discovered to her. She read it over and
over again. It presented life exactly as life presented itself to the
round eyes of Rosalie: all males doing always noisy and violent and
important and enthralling things, with Prospero, her father, by far the
most important of all; and women scarcely appearing and doing only
what the men told them to do. Miranda’s appearances in the story were
indifferently skipped by Rosalie; the noisy action and language in the
wreck, and the noisy action and language of the drunkards in the wood
were what she liked, and all the magic arts of Prospero were what she
thoroughly appreciated and understood. That was life as she knew it.
Rosalie’s father, when Rosalie thought the world belonged to him and
revolved about him, was tall and cleanshaven and of complexion a dark
and burning red. When he was excited or angry his face used to burn as
the embers in the study fire burned when Rosalie pressed the bellows
against them. He had thick black eyebrows and a most powerful nose. His
nose jutted from his face like a projection from a cliff beneath a clump
of bushes. He had been at Cambridge and he was most ferociously fond of
Cambridge. One of the most fearful scenes Rosalie ever witnessed was on
one boat-race day when Harold appeared with a piece of Oxford ribbon in
his buttonhole. It was at breakfast, the family for some reason or other
most unusually all taking breakfast together. Rosalie’s father
first jocularly bantered Harold on his choice of colour, and
everybody--anxious as always to please and placate the owner of the
world--laughed with father against Harold. But Harold did not laugh.
Harold smouldered resentment and defiance, and out of his smouldering
began to maintain “from what chaps had said” that Oxford was altogether
and in every way a much better place than Cambridge. In every branch of
athletics there were better athletes, growled Harold, at Oxford.
Rosalie has been watching the embers in her father’s face glowing to
dark-red heat. Everybody had been watching them except Harold who,
though addressing his father, had been mumbling “what chaps had said” to
his plate.
“Athletes!” cried Rosalie’s father suddenly in a very terrible voice.
“Athletes! And what about scholars, sir?”
Harold informed his plate that he wasn’t talking about scholars.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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