“MAMA, I CAN’T POSSIBLY wear that!” Jemima said indignantly. “I shall look terrible. People will think I am ill. They’ll be offering me chairs to sit on, in case I fall over.” Her face was flushed with temper and frustration. She appeared the picture of health, as if it would take a runaway carriage to knock her off balance, not a fainting fit.
Pitt looked up from the newspaper he was reading. They were all in the parlor, the summer evening air drifting in from the open French windows. Daniel was absorbed in a Boy’s Own Paper and Charlotte had been looking at the London Illustrated News.
Pitt regarded the dress Jemima was holding up. “You wanted that last year,” he pointed out. “It suited you excellently.”
“Papa, that was last year!” she said with exasperation at his lack of understanding.
“You haven’t changed all that much.” He looked her up and down quite carefully. “An inch taller, perhaps,” he conceded.
“Two inches taller,” she corrected him. “At the very least. And anyway, I’m completely different.” It distressed her that he had not noticed.
“You don’t look completely different to me,” he answered.
“Yes, she does,” Daniel argued. “She’s a girl. She’s getting all …” Suddenly he realized what he was saying and was lost for the appropriate words.
Jemima blushed. “You’re trying to make me look like a child,” she accused her father. “Genevieve’s father does the same thing. He doesn’t want her ever to become a woman.”
“You’re fourteen,” Pitt said flatly. “You are a child.”
“I’m not! That’s a terrible thing to say!” Unaccountably Jemima was on the edge of tears.
Daniel bent his head back to his Boy’s Own Paper, lifting it a little higher to hide his face.
Pitt looked at Charlotte. He had no idea how he had offended, or what to do about it. It was totally unreasonable.
Charlotte had grown up with two sisters and there was no mystery in it for her.
“You are not having a purple dress, and that’s all there is to it,” she told her daughter. “If you feel that that one is too young for you, then wear the blue one.”
“Blue’s ordinary,” Jemima responded. “Everyone has blue. It’s dull. It’s safe!” That was the worst condemnation she could think of.
“You don’t need anything special,” Pitt told her gently. “You’re very pretty whatever you wear.”
“You just say that because you’re my father!” Her voice choked as if she could not control her tears any longer. “You have to like the way I look.”
“I don’t!” He was surprised and a little defensive himself. “If you wore something I didn’t like, I would say so.”
“You’d have my hair in braids down my back as if I were ten!” she said furiously. She turned to Charlotte. “Mama, everyone wears blue, it’s boring. And pink looks like you’re a child!”
“Yellow?” Daniel suggested helpfully.
“Then I shall look as if I have jaundice!” she responded. “Why can’t I wear purple?”
Daniel was not to be put off. “Green?”
“Then I’ll look sickly! Just be quiet!”
“Aunt Emily wears green,” he pointed out.
“She’s got fair hair, stupid!” she shouted at him.
“Jemima!” Charlotte said sharply. “That was quite uncalled for. He was being perfectly sensible, and pale green would look very nice—”
“I don’t want to be ‘nice’!” Jemima said furiously. “I want to be interesting, different, grown up.” The tears spilled from her eyes onto her cheeks. “I want to look lovely. Why can’t you understand?” Without waiting for an answer she swung round and stormed out. They heard her feet banging on the treads up the stairs and then a door on the landing slam.
“What did I do?” Daniel asked incredulously.
“Nothing,” Charlotte assured him.
“Then why is she like that?”
“Because she’s fourteen,” Charlotte replied. “She wants to look nice at the supper party she’s going to.”
“She always looks nice.” Pitt was reasonable, and confused. “She’s very pretty. In fact she looks more like you every day.”
Charlotte smiled ruefully. “I’m not sure she’d appreciate your saying so, my dear.”
“She did the other day,” he argued.
“That was then, this is now,” she answered. There was no use trying to explain it to him. He had grown up without sisters. Girls of Jemima’s age were as incomprehensible to him as mermaids or unicorns.
Daniel shrugged and turned the next page of his Boy’s Own, to the story of a pirate adventure off the coast of India. “Why couldn’t she have been a boy?” he said resignedly. “That would have been better for all of us.”
“It would have been easier,” Charlotte corrected him. “Not