He dresses and behaves as a country gentleman of leisure, idling with a newspaper and living off the labor of others by luring their fowl to his feather-filled shed. Potter had little tolerance for indolence and lack of industry, but, as a country woman, she knew foxes were clever and managed to escape more times than they were caught. From the first encounter between Jemima and the fox, the reader realises the fox is more clever than Jemima and is forced to extend him a grudging admiration. Helen Beatrix Potter was born on 28 July 1866 to barrister Rupert William Potter and his wife Helen (Leech) Potter in London. She was educated by governesses and tutors, and passed a quiet childhood reading, painting, drawing, visiting museums and art exhibitions, and tending a nursery menagerie of small animals. Her interests in the natural world and country life were nurtured with holidays in Scotland, the Lake District, and Camfield Place, the Hertfordshire home of her paternal grandparents. Potter's adolescence was as quiet as her childhood. She grew into a spinsterish young woman whose parents groomed her to be a permanent resident and housekeeper in their home. She continued to paint and draw, and experienced her first professional artistic success in 1890 when she sold six designs of humanised animals to a greeting card publisher. She hoped to lead a useful life independent of her parents, and tentatively considered a career in mycology, but the all-male scientific community regarded her as an amateur and she abandoned fungi. Potter had maintained contact with her last governess Annie Carter Moore and had grown fond of her children. Through the 1890s, she sent illustrated story letters to the children. Moore recognised the literary and artistic value of the letters and urged her former charge to publish. Potter liked the suggestion, and, in 1900, revised a tale she had written for five-year-old Noel Moore in 1893, and fashioned a dummy book of it in imitation of Helen Bannerman's 1899 bestseller "The Story of Little Black Sambo". Unable to find a buyer for the tale, she published it for family and friends at her own expense in December 1901. Frederick Warne & Co. had once rejected the tale but, eager to compete in the booming small format children's book market, reconsidered and accepted the "bunny book" (as the firm called it) following the recommendation of their prominent children's book artist L. Leslie Brooke. Potter agreed to colour her pen and ink illustrations, chose the then-new Hentschel three-colour process for reproducing her watercolours, and on 2 October 1902 "The Tale of Peter Rabbit" was released.