men.
She felt a vague shame and anger because of it, but she did not know
what it meant. She had read novels, but the love interest in them was
like a musical theme which she, hearing, did not fully understand.
She was not in the least a boylike girl; she was wholly feminine, but
the feminine element was held in delicate and gentle restraint.
Without doubt Mrs. Wilton's old-fashioned gentility, and Miss
Pamela's, and her governess's, who belonged to the same epoch, had
served to mould her character not altogether undesirably. She was, on
the whole, a pleasant and surprising contrast to girls of her age,
with her pretty, shy respect for her elders, and lack of
self-assertion, along with entire self-possession and good breeding.
However, she had missed many things which poor Miss Farrel had
considered desirable for her, and which her hostesses with their
self-sanctified evasion had led her to think had been done.

Miss Farrel, teaching in her country school, had had visions of the
girl riding a thoroughbred in Central Park, with a groom in
attendance; whereas the reality was the old man who served both as
coachman and butler, in carefully kept livery, guiding two horses apt
to stumble from extreme age through the shopping district, and the
pretty face of the girl looking out of the window of an ancient coupe
which, nevertheless, had a coat of arms upon its door. Miss Farrel
imagined Rose in a brilliant house-party at Wiltmere, Mrs. Wilton's
and Miss Pamela's country home; whereas in reality she was roaming
about the fields and woods with an old bull-terrier for guard and
companion. Rose generally carried a book on these occasions, and
generally not a modern book. Her governess had a terror of modern
books, especially of novels. She had looked into a few and shuddered.
Rose's taste in literature was almost Elizabethan. She was not
allowed, of course, to glance at early English novels, which her
governess classed with late English and American in point of
morality, but no poetry except Byron was prohibited.

Rose loved to sit under a tree with the dog in a white coil beside
her, and hold her book open on her lap and read a word now and then,
and amuse herself with fancies the rest of the time. She grew in
those days of her early girlhood to have firm belief in those things
which she never saw nor heard, and the belief had not wholly deserted
her. She never saw a wood-nymph stretch out a white arm from a tree,
but she be