Hetty Dorval by Ethel Wilson

he said and continued his reading. But now I had to tell him about my visit, and get it over. I stood up infront of him in my overalls and buckskin jacket and with my hands behind me.
    “Father,” I said.
    “Well, what?” he said mildly, with his eyes on the page.
    “Father, I want to tell you I’m not going to Mrs. Dorval’s any more.”
    “You don’t say! Very nice of you, I’m sure,” Father said without looking up, in a half-teasing half-sarcastic way he had.
    But now was the hard part. I said again, “Father.”
    “Now, Frankie, it’s over and done with, stop harping on it,” he said impatiently.
    “But, Father, I went there last night again because I had to say good-bye, but I won’t go any more.”
    Father lowered the newspaper and pushed his rancher’s broad-brimmed hat back from his forehead and looked at me as if he couldn’t believe his eyes and ears.
    “Well, I’ll be blowed,” he said slowly. “I can’t understand
you!”
    “But
Father
 …”
    “I don’t – want – to – hear – anything – more – about – it,” he said pausing emphatically at each word. “You go and talk to your mother.” And I left him rattling the newspaper about at arm’s length and scowling at the newsprint.
    Not long after that last visit of mine to the bungalow Mother told me that they had decided to send me down to the Coast to school, instead of waiting till the following year. Father had begun to think me unpredictable and felt that, as things were, I had too much time on my hands. Yet they did not want to bring me back to the ranch, away from school and all the other children. So at the end of the summer Mother and I drove to the Coast along the great road that hugs the Fraser Canyon, and I went to a little school in Vancouver nearStanley Park. It was small, with about eight boarders, and we slept in three attic rooms at the top of the tall house. The house was old, there was little equipment of any kind, the fare was plain, but old Mrs. Richards was kind, and Mrs. Brookes, her daughter, was really concerned with education. She brought to the subjects she taught us an interest that was never perfunctory, and our lessons had meaning and direction. I think that old Mrs. Richards was interested in her pupils, while young Mrs. Brookes was interested in their education, and this worked out very well.
    We were so near to Stanley Park that it was our playground and paradise. We liked our bedrooms on the top floor because we saw into the Park and across the lagoon. Over the forests of the Park we saw the mountains across the Inlet, and looking the other way, to the west, we could see the waters of English Bay and the great sunsets over the ocean.
    There was in our bedroom a large circular mirror of good glass with a cheap old frame. This mirror had been placed, probably by chance, so that it isolated and held a reflection of the Sleeping Beauty. You looked through your window and there the mountains lay loftily to the sky. The Sleeping Beauty’s covering of forest, drawn up over her knees, descends into a valley, and from this valley rises another mountain. You turned, and stepped aside, and saw at an angle that the circular mirror had seized and isolated a portion of the beautiful descending and ascending lines of the mountains and the great dark pointed fir trees of the nearby Park below. It became the habit of the four of us in the bedroom to look at our “picture.” When our mothers came to see the school we would take them upstairs, and “Look,” we would say, “at the picture!” One of us had first discovered it, and on fine days there it was awaiting us in soft clarity. This reflection, held inthe circular frame, had more unity and significance than when you turned and saw its substance as only a part of the true, flowing, continuous line of the mountains. I learned from these mountains and from the picture in the mirror the potent and insinuating quality of line, be it in a mountain, or in