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Updated: June 3, 2025
"They're wretched even in Huggo. But Huggo's a boy. You're a girl." "Well, mother, I didn't ask to be a girl." "Doda, that's merely silly." "A lot of us say it, that's all I know." "Then, darling, a lot of you are silly." "Oh, I shall be glad when next week I go to the Fergussons. It is dull." Look, there she is. She's sixteen. She's beautiful. She's pretty as a picture, and she knows she is.
She was very pretty and a cheery soul. She would have been called fast when Rosalie was a girl. In 1921 she would almost, in the manner she presented to Rosalie, have been called slow. Doda and she were greatly attached. Doda, overnight, going straight upstairs to bed, had said, "Have you seen Huggo to-day? He's in a scrape of some sort." "Oh, Doda, what kind of a scrape?" "He didn't tell me.
It helps them." "Are they friends of yours, dear? Personal friends." "They're brothers of girls I've stayed with." "All?" "Practically all. There're not more than two or three. Lonely soldiers, they're called. They used to advertise. It helps them. There's no harm in it, is there?" "I haven't suggested there is, Doda." "I can see you're going to, though. If you ask me " She stopped.
They had their friends, each one, and much preferred their friends. You'd not, it's true, say that of Benji; but Benji in fraternal wish had to take what was offered him and there was nothing offered him by Doda; by Huggo less than nothing. Benji! Look, here's the Benji one; the good, the quiet, gentle one; the one that never gave a thought of trouble, Benji. Her Benji!
Those three children who on the one part never saw their mother sad and were constrained to comfort her, on the other never were bribed to good behaviour by the thought of grieving her. They only associated happiness with her and they enjoyed happiness simply by reasoning away unhappiness. Kind, wise, simple, effective, easy. Happy Huggo, happy Doda, happy Benji, happy Rosalie!
She had a packet in her hands. As she began to stoop over the fire she suddenly uprighted herself and turned upon her mother. She said violently, "Perhaps you'd like to count them?" Rosalie said very softly, "Doda!" Doda bent to the flames and pressed the packet down upon them. She stood watching them mount about it. A half-burnt photograph slid onto the hearth.
It would have been more truly jolly, she used to think, if Doda had not largely divided her time between writing to apparently innumerable school friends and counting the days to when she might be released for the Brittany expedition; and if Huggo had not for the first few days openly sulked at the veto on the Yorkshire invitation.
In a very short while she found her feet and that excuse no longer was put forward. Every girl of Doda's association was on her feet in 1919; and for Doda very much easier, at that, than for the generality, to establish her position in the house. By 1920, when she was nineteen, she was conducting her life as she pleased, as nineteen manifestly should.
There was also Huggo. What was Huggo doing? Overnight Rosalie had seen Doda, come in late from an evening with a very intimate friend of hers always known, through some private joke of Doda's, as "the foreign friend." The foreign friend, not in the least foreign but English, was a young married woman living apart from her husband. Doda had brought her to the house once.
Doda came home and Doda's first excitement was that nothing arranged might interfere with an invitation from mid-August to a schoolfellow whose family were going to Brittany. So much for her holiday necessity! Rosalie thought. So much for Harry's idea of how the children would naturally long to spend the vacation all together!
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