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THE LITTLE VANITIES OF
MRS. WHITTAKER

A Novel

BY

JOHN STRANGE WINTER

AUTHOR OF

“Bootles’ Baby,” “The Truth-Tellers,” “A Blaze of Glory,”
“Marty,” “Little Joan,” “Cherry’s Child,”
“A Blameless Woman,” etc.

FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY

NEW YORK AND LONDON
1904

Copyright, 1904, by
FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
[Published, June, 1904]

CONTENTS

The Little Vanities of
Mrs. Whittaker

CHAPTER I

REGINA BROWN

There are many who think that the unfamiliar is best.

To begin my story properly, I must go back to the time when the Empress Eugenie had not started the vogue of the crinoline, when the Indian Mutiny had not stained the pages of history, and the Crimean War was as yet but a cloud the size of a man’s hand on the horizon of the world—that is to say, to the very early fifties.

It was then that a little girl-child was born into the world, a little girl who was called by the name of Regina, and whose father and mother bore the homely appellation of Mr. and Mrs. Brown; yes, plain, simple and homely Brown, without even so much as an “e” placed at the tail thereof to give it a distinction from all the other Browns.

So far as I have ever heard, the young childhood of Regina Brown was passed in quite an ordinary and conventional atmosphere. Her parents were well-meaning, honest, kindly, well-disposed, middle-class persons. According to their lights they educated their daughter extremely well; that is to say, she was sent to a genteel seminary, she was always nicely dressed, and she wore her hair in ringlets.

This state of things continued, without any particular change, until Regina was nearly twenty years old. By that time the great Franco-Prussian War had beaten itself into peace, the horrors of the Commune of Paris had come and gone, and the sun of Regina Brown’s twentieth birthday rose upon a world in which nations had come once more, at least to outward seeming, to the conclusion that all men are brothers. It might have been some long-forgotten echo from the early days when France and England fought against Russia, or it might have been in a measure owing to the conflict, so long, so deadly and so bloody, between France and Germany, but certain is it that, when Regina Brown realized that she was twenty years old, she came to the conclusion that she was leading a wasted life.

If the period in which she lived had been that of to-day, I think Regina Brown would have entered herself at any hospital that would have accepted her and would have trained for a nurse; but, in the early seventies, nursing was not, as now, the almost regulation answer to the question, “What shall we do with our girls?”

“What shall I do with my life?” she said, looking in the modest little glass which swung above her toilet-table. “What shall I do with my life? Live here, pandering to my father and mother, listening to my father’s accounts of how some man at the club wagered a shilling on a matter which could make no difference to anyone; hearing mother’s elaborate account of the delinquencies of Charlotte Ann, who really is not such a bad girl, after all. I can’t go on like this—I can’t bear it any longer. It’s a waste of life; it’s a waste of a strong, capable, original brain. I must get out into the world and do something.”

In the course of life one comes across so many people who are always yearning to go out into the world and do something, but Regina Brown was not a young woman who could or would content herself with mere yearning. With her to think was to do. With her a resolve was a fact practically accomplished.

“I will go in for the higher education,” she said to herself. “What do I know now? I can dance a little, play a little, paint a little. I know no useful things. My mother sews my clothes and makes my under-linen; my mother orders the dinner, and never will entrust the making of the pastry to any hand but her own. What is there left for me? Nothing! I must go out into the world. There is only one line in which I am likely to make success, and I am not the class of woman who makes for failure. I will become a great teacher. To become a great teacher, I must qualify myself. I must work, and work hard. I must enter at some regular school of learning, or, failing that, I must find a first-class tutor to work with me.”

Eventually Regina Brown adopted the latter course. As a matter of fact, she was not sufficiently advanced in any branch of education to enter at any school of learning which admitted women to its curriculum. To Regina it mattered little or nothing. For the next ten years she lived in an atmosphere of hard learning. She proved herself a worker of no mean ability. She passed all manner of examinations, she took numberless degrees, and on the day on which she was thirty years old, she found herself once more gazing at her face in the glass and wondering what she was going to do with the knowledge that she had so laboriously acquired.

“Regina Brown,” she said to herself, “you are no nearer to becoming a great teacher than you were ten years ago this very day. Will anyone ever put you in charge of a high school? Will anyone give you a responsible post in any of the spheres where women can prove that they are the equals, and more than the equals, of men? It is very doubtful. You know much, but you have no influence. Ten years ago to-day, Regina Brown, you told yourself that your mode of existence was a waste of life. Well, you are wasting your life still. The best thing you can do, Regina Brown, is to get yourself married.”

So Regina Brown got herself married.

Now, to put such an action in those words is not a romantic way of describing the most—or what should be the most—romantic episode of a woman’s life; but I use Regina’s own words, and I say that she got herself married.

She was not wholly unattractive. She had a pinky skin and frank grey eyes, but her figure was of the pincushion order, and much study had done away with that lissomness which is one of the most attractive attributes of womenkind. Her hands were white, strong, determined; white because they were mostly occupied about books and papers, strong because she herself was strong, and determined because it was her nature to be so. Her feet, frankly speaking, were large. She was a young woman who sat solidly on a solid chair, and looked thoroughly in place. Her features otherwise were neither bad nor good, and I think she was probably one of the worst dressers that the world has ever seen. It was no uncommon thing for Regina Brown to wear a salmon-pink ribbon twisted about her ample waist and to crown her toilet with a covering of turquoise blue.

It was about this time that Regina received a valentine—the first in her life. She held it sacred from any eye but her own, in fact she put it into the fire before any of the family had time to see it. The words ran thus:—

“Regina Brown, Regina Brown,
You think yourself a beauty;
In pink and green
And yellow sheen
You go to do your duty.
Regina Brown, Regina Brown,
Whenever will you learn
That pink and green
And golden sheen
Are colors you should spurn?
Regina Brown, Regina Brown,
Take lesson from the lily,
A lesson meek,
Not far to seek,
’Twill keep you from being silly!”

I cannot truthfully say that the valentine did Regina the smallest amount of good. You know, my gentle reader, if we only look at things the right way, we can find good in everything. As some poet has beautifully put it in a couplet about sermons in stones and running brooks—“And good in everything,” Regina might even have found good out of that malicious and spiteful valentine with its excellent likeness, done in water colors, of herself clad in weird and wonderful garments, the like of which even she had never attempted. But Regina consigned it to the flames, and went on her way precisely as she had done before, for Regina was a woman of strong nature and settled convictions. I give you this piece of information because you will find by the story which I shall tell and you will read, that this curious dominance of nature proved to be one of the mainsprings of this remarkable character.

So Regina went on her way and she got married. I don’t say that it was a brilliant alliance—by no means. The man was young, younger than Regina. He was weak-looking and pretty, of a pink-and-white, wax-doll type, with shining fair hair and rather watery blue eyes. To his weakness Regina’s dominant nature strongly appealed; perhaps, also, in some measure the fact that she was the sole child of her father’s house, and that her father lived upon his means, and described himself as “gentleman” in the various papers connected with the politics of his country which from time to time reached him. Be that as it may, an engagement came about between Regina Brown and this young man, who was “something in the city” and who rejoiced in the name of Alfred Whittaker.

I must confess that it was somewhat of a shock to Regina when she found that among his fellows—young, vapid, rather raffish young men—he was known by the abbreviative of “Alf.”

“Dearest,” she said to him one day, after this unpalatable information had come to her, “I noticed that your friend, Mr. Fitzsimmons, called you ‘Alf’ last night.”

“Yes, the fellows mostly do,” he replied.

“But you were not called Alf at home, dearest,” said Regina.

She laid her substantial hand upon his arm and looked at him yearningly.

“My mother and my sisters always called me Alfie,” said he, returning the gaze with interest, for he admired Regina with an admiration which was wholly genuine.

“I really couldn’t call you Alfie,” she said.

“I don’t see why you couldn’t, Regina,” he replied. “It seems to me such an awful thing for people who love one another to be saying ‘Regina’ and ‘Alfred.’ There is something so chilly about it. Did your people never call you by a pet name?”

“Never,” said Regina.

“I should like to,” said Alfred, still more yearningly.

“If you can think of a pet name that will not be derogatory to my dignity—” Regina began, when the weak and weedy Alfred insinuated an arm about her ample waist and drew her nearer to him.

Without some effort on the part of Regina Brown, I doubt if his intention could have been carried into effect, but Regina yielded herself to his tenderness with a shy coyness which was sufficiently marked to have merited even the pet name of Tiny.

“What would you like me to call you—Alfred?” she asked, with the faintest possible pause before the last word.

“Call me Alfie,” said he in manly and imperative tones.

“Dear Alfie!” said Regina.

“Darling!” said Alfie.

“You couldn’t call me darling as a name,” said Regina, coyly.

“I shall always call you darling,” he gurgled. “But I should like, as a name, to call you Queenie.”

“You shall call me Anna Maria Stubbs if you like,” said Regina, with a sudden surrender of her dignity.

And forthwith, from that moment, between themselves she was known no longer by her real name, but sank into a state of hopeless adoration, and was called Queenie.

CHAPTER II

MRS. ALFRED WHITTAKER

It is curious how the possession of humble things satisfies the souls of naturally ambitious people.

In due course Regina Brown merged her identity into that of Mrs. Alfred Whittaker.

They were not married in a hurry. Regina had come of old-fashioned people, who held firmly to the belief that courting time is the sweetest of a woman’s life; that it is good for man to look and long for the woman of his heart, and for woman to be coy and to hold him who will eventually become her liege lord at arm’s length for a suitable period. To people of the Brown, and indeed of the Whittaker class, there is something in a short engagement and a hurried-on marriage which borders almost upon immodesty.

“We won’t be engaged very long,” said Alfred, when he had been made the happiest man in the world for nearly six weeks.

“No, not long,” returned Regina. “My father and mother were engaged for seven years.”

“Good God!” exclaimed Alfred, who was somewhat given to strong language, as many weak men are. “Good God, Regina, you have taken my breath away!”

“I wasn’t proposing to be engaged to you for seven years, Alfie dear,” she said to him, with an indulgent air. “Oh no. I always thought that father and mother made such a mistake, although you couldn’t get mother to own it.”

“I should think so, indeed. Seven years! Seven months is nearer my idea of the proper time for being engaged.”

“Seven months? Oh, that would be too soon. I couldn’t possibly get my things ready.”

“Oh, things,” said he, with a manly disregard of chiffons which appealed to Regina as nothing else would have done.

“I must have things, Alfie.”

“Yes, darling, I know you must. And I don’t say that a good start-out wouldn’t be very useful to us; but you won’t spin it out too long, will you?”

“I never was brought up to sew,” said Regina, “I am learning now.”

“Can’t you buy ’em ready-made?”

“They don’t last,” said Regina. “And mother’s idea of the trousseau is to give me three dozen of everything. And they’ve all got to be made. I’m sewing white seams now, although I can’t cut out and plan. Look at my finger.”

He possessed himself of the firm, strong, first finger of his fiancée’s left hand and kissed it rapturously. “Poor little finger,” said he, “poor dear little finger! Can’t you have people in to do the things?”

“I am afraid that would go against mother’s ideas,” Regina returned, “but I’ll sound her on the point.”

Eventually Regina Brown’s three dozen of everything were got together, neatly folded, and tied up in half-dozens with delicate shades of ribbon, and the wedding day was fixed to take place just fourteen months after the engagement had come about.

The bride’s parents came down handsomely on the occasion. It was a great event, that wedding. Eight bridesmaids, four in pink and four in blue, followed Regina to the altar. Regina herself was dressed as a bride in a shiny white silk, with a voluminous veil. There was a large company, and much flying to and fro of hired carriages—mostly with white horses—distributing of favors, and a popping of champagne corks, when all was over and the two had been made man and wife. And then there was a heart-broken parting, when Regina was torn away from the ample bosom of her adoring mother, and a wild shower of rice and satin slippers, such as strewed the road before the Brown domicile for many days after the wedding was over.

So Regina Brown became Mrs. Alfred Whittaker, and her place in her father’s house knew her no more.

All things considered, she made an admirable wife. If Alfred adored Regina, Regina worshipped Alfred, and under her care, and in the sunshine of her lavish and outspoken admiration of his personal beauty, he grew sleek and prosperous.

If only a son had been born to them, a little son who would have carried on the traditions of both families, who could have been called Brown-Whittaker, and gladdened the hearts of three separate households. But no son came—never a sign of a son. On the contrary, about a year after their marriage a little daughter arrived on the scene, who was welcomed as a precursor of the unborn Brown-Whittaker, and was named Maud. And little Maud Whittaker grew and throve apace, went through the usual early infantile troubles, and, about two years later, the process which is known among domestic people as having her nose put out of joint.

And again it was a girl.

For some reason not explained to the whole world, the second baby was christened Julia, and forthwith became a very important item in the world.

“The next one must be a boy,” said Mrs. Alfred Whittaker, as she cuddled the new arrival to her side.

But there never was a next one, and slowly, as the second baby got through her troubles and began to toddle about and to play games with her sister, the truth was borne in upon her parents that what Maud had begun Julia had finished—that no boy would come to gladden the hearts of the Whittaker and Brown households, that no little Brown-Whittaker would ever make history.

Well, it was when Julia Whittaker was about six years old that her mother’s mind underwent a curious change. She was then just forty years old, a fine, buxom, healthy woman, a good deal given to looking upon the rest of the world with a superior eye, to feeling that whereas the other married ladies of her set had been content with the genteel education of a private seminary, she had gone further and had received the wide-minded and broad education of a professional man.

It was true enough. There was no subject on which Mrs. Alfred Whittaker was not able to demonstrate an exceedingly pronounced and autocratic opinion. She seldom wasted her time, even after her marriage, in reading what she called trash, and other people spoke of as a “circulating library.” Deep thoughts filled her mind, great questions entranced her interest, and high views dominated her life. She was keen on politics of the most Radical order. She had sifted religion, and found it wanting. She was an advanced Socialist—in her views, that is to say—and deep down in her heart, although as yet it had never found expression, was an innate admiration of men and an equal contempt for women. She felt, and often she said, that she had a man’s mind in an extremely feminine body.

“I cannot,” she declared one day, when discussing a great social question with a clever friend of Alfred’s, “shut my eyes to the fact that I do not look on a question of this kind as an ordinary woman would. An ordinary woman jumps to conclusions without knowing why or wherefore. I, on the contrary, have a clear and logical mind, which gets me perhaps to the same goal by a clear and definite process of reasoning. We may come from the same, and we may arrive at the same, and yet we are so different that neither has any sympathy with the other.”

And out of this conversation there arose in Regina Whittaker’s mind an idea that, after all, another decade had gone by, and she was still wasting her life.

“I asked myself a question at twenty,” her thoughts ran. “I asked it again at thirty, and now I have touched my fortieth birthday, here I am asking it yet once more. I have fulfilled the functions of wife and mother, and nothing else. Yet I am an extraordinary woman, far out of the common in intelligence, brain power, logic, and in all mental attributes. It only shows me that the time is not yet ripe for woman to become the equal of man. It is not the fault of the woman. Through many generations—nay, hundreds of years—she has been kept ignorant, inefficient, downtrodden by her lord and master. She has been used as a toy, and her one mission in life has been a mere function of nature—the reproduction of the race. It makes me savage,” she went on, talking to herself, “when I hear it cited as an immense work that a woman has produced so many babies. How many, I wonder, have produced those babies with any love of duty, poor feeble souls? After all, there is so little duty about it, and no choice midway. Well, here am I, who should be in a big position in the world, I who should have made myself a name, I who could have put George Eliot and all her set in the shade. I have absolutely wasted my life. I suppose I began too late. I am out of the common, but I do not rank as a woman out of the common. Still, I have daughters. From this moment I dedicate my life to my little Maud and Julia. They shall not begin their mission in the world too late. I would rather have been the mother of boys, but as I have proved to be only the mother of girls, I will try to make those girls what I have missed being myself. They shall be out of the common; they shall belong to the New Womanhood; they shall be brought up at least to be the equals of men.”

Now by this time the “something in the city” on which Regina and Alfred had started housekeeping had resolved itself into a very solid and prosperous position, though Alfred Whittaker—make no mistake about it—was not, and was never likely to be, a millionaire, or even a very wealthy man. But he was prosperous in a comfortable, assured, middle-class way. He was ambitious too—I mean socially ambitious—and he liked to feel that his wife was in a good set in the suburb in which they lived. He liked to go to church occasionally, and to have his own seat when he did so. He liked his rector to come to him as an open-handed, clean-living man on whom he could depend for contributions suitable to his style of living. He liked to be able to take his wife to a theatre, and to dine her beforehand, and to give her a bit of supper afterwards. He liked to go to the seaside for August, and to take a trip to Paris at Easter if he was so inclined. And, above all things, Alfred Whittaker liked a good dinner, a pretty, tasteful table, and a neat handmaiden to wait upon him. To do him justice, he never lost his early admiration for Regina. It was wonderful that he had not done so, for with her improved circumstances and her improved position, Regina’s taste in dress had not advanced. Sometimes, on a birthday, or some anniversary kept religiously by them, such as their day of engagement, their wedding day, the day on which they first met, the day on which they moved into the house they occupied—such domestic altars as most of us erect during the course of our lives—he would bring her home a present of a bonnet. He called it a bonnet, but it was generally a hat. Alfred always called it a bonnet nevertheless, and Regina invariably accepted it with blushes of admiration, and wore it with what, in another woman, would have been the courage of a martyr. It was no martyrdom to Regina. I have seen her with all her fair hair turned back from her large face, crowned with a modiste’s edifice which would have proved trying to a lovely girl of eighteen.

“You like my hat?” said Regina, one day to a friend. “Isn’t it lovely? Dear Alfie brought it for me from town. I believe he sent to Paris for it. It has a French name in the crown. Much more extravagant than I should have got for myself—these white feathers won’t wear, and all this lovely sky-blue velvet and these delicate pearl ornaments are far beyond what I should have chosen on my own responsibility. But I can’t help seeing how it becomes me.”

“Why don’t you have a waistcoat of the same color—a front, you know—this part?” asked her friend, making a line from her throat to her belt buckle.

“There is a sameness about the idea,” said Regina, superbly. “I have always flattered myself, Mrs. Marston, that I am one of the few women who can bear to mix her colors. You remember the old story of the young man who asked Sir Joshua Reynolds what he mixed his colors with, and his reply—‘Brains, sir, brains.’”

CHAPTER III

YE DENE

There is something very alluring in the idea of kicking down conventions, yet if this be carried too far, it is possible that all the feminine virtues will follow suit. A woman bereft of all the feminine virtues is as pitiable a sight as a head which has been shorn of its locks.

A couple of years went by, and again the circumstances of the Alfred Whittakers were improved. For the old lady whose husband had courted her for seven long years was taken ill and quite suddenly died. Her death affected and upset Regina very much. It happened that she had not been over to her old home for several days, though Regina, although she was such a good wife, had continued to be also an extremely good daughter, and usually contrived to visit the old people at least twice a week. Just at this time, however, some trifling indisposition of little Julia’s had kept her from paying her usual visit to her parents.

“Here is a letter from my father,” she said one morning at breakfast to Alfred. “He seems to think mother is not very well.”

“Oh, poor dear, poor dear. You had better go across and see her.”

“Yes. I should have gone yesterday but for the child not being quite well,” Regina responded.

“Anyway, she’s all right to-day—well enough for you to leave her with nurse. You had better go across and spend the day, and I’ll come round that way and fetch you home in the evening.”

To this arrangement Regina agreed, and she went over to her father’s house as soon as she had concluded arrangements for the children’s meals. She did not, however, return to Fairview—as their house was called—that evening with Alfred. No, she remained under the paternal roof for a few days, and then, when she at length returned to her home and her children, she was accompanied by the old man, who was as a ship without a rudder when he found himself bereft of the wife for whom he had served, even as Jacob served seven years for Rachel.

It was the beginning of the end for old Mr. Brown. He declined absolutely to go back to the house where he had lived so long and so happily, and took up his permanent abode at Fairview. Very soon the better part of the furniture, and certain priceless possessions with which there was no thought of parting, were transferred from the one house to the other, the old domicile was done up and eventually let, and then, as so often happens with old people who have been uprooted from their regular life, Mr. Brown sank into extreme illness.

Poor man, he had never been ill in his life, and he took to it badly. One paralytic stroke succeeded another, and, at last, after a few months of much repining and wearing suffering, he passed quietly away, his last words being that he was going to rejoin his dear wife on the other side.

It was then that the Alfred Whittakers left Fairview.

“I shall never fancy the house again since poor father’s death,” said Regina on the evening of the funeral.

“No, I can quite believe that,” returned Alfred Whittaker, sympathetically. “Well,” he added after a pause, “you will be able to afford a larger house if you want it.”

“I should like a larger garden,” said Regina. “I think children brought up without a garden are generally unhappy little creatures, and ours are getting big enough to enjoy it.”

By that time Julia was nine years old, and Maud, of course, two years older still. Their father and mother therefore gave notice to their landlord, and cast about in their minds for some new and desirable neighborhood which would contain a new and desirable residence.

They decided eventually on purchasing a house in the most artistic suburb of London, that which is known among Londoners as Northampton Park. They were lucky enough to find a house to be sold at a reasonable price in the main road of this quaint little village. It stood well back from the traffic, having a long garden between the gate and the entrance. The gate was rustic and wooden, and was decorated with an art copper plate of irregular shape, on which the name of the house was embossed in quaint letters extremely difficult to read—“Ye Dene.”

“Why,” asked Julia, when she and her sister were taken to see the new domicile, “why do you call our new house Ye Den? Is it a den?”

“Ye Dene, dearest—Ye Dene. It is old English spelling,” said Regina. “I think it is rather pretty, don’t you Alfie?”

“H’m, the house is nice enough, and you youngsters will enjoy the garden, which is far better than you have ever had before. I believe it costs a lot of money to alter the name of a house; in fact, I don’t know whether one is allowed to or not. I’ll find out.”

But, somehow, they took possession of their new home without finding out whether it was possible to alter the name thereof.

“What about headed paper, Queenie?” said Alfred, when they were at breakfast on the second morning after their entrance into the new domicile.

“Headed paper? Oh yes, we must have that, dear.”

“Well, will you stick to calling the house Ye Dene?”

“Well,” said Regina, “I went for a little turn yesterday, and I took note of all the houses and what their names were. I passed Charles Lodge and George Cottage, and The Poplars, The Elms, The Quarry, The Nook, Ingleside, High Elms, The Briars, and a dozen different variations of the same, such as Briar Cottage, High Elms Cottage, and so on; but I didn’t see any other house that seemed to be connected with this one. I rather like the name, and that queer, irregular-shaped copper plate will be a sort of landmark when our friends come from town to see us.”

“How would it be,” suggested Alfred, “to have the shape of the plate reproduced for our address—a kind of scroll the shape of that with ‘Ye Dene’ in the middle?”

“Yes, that’s a good idea,” said Regina. “But you will have to put Northampton Park within the shield, or else it will look very odd.”

“Well, look here,” said he, “I’ll take the pattern of it and see what Cuthberts can suggest.”

The result of this conversation was that Cuthberts, the celebrated notepaper dealers, made a very pretty suggestion embodying the shield, the name of Ye Dene and the further postal address, and the Whittakers finally decided that they would not trouble to alter the name of their new residence.

It was at the Park—for I may as well follow the customs of its inhabitants and speak of it as they do—that Mrs. Whittaker began to seriously think of the education of her children.

They made friends slowly. In due course the vicar called upon them, and was followed a little later by his wife. Then the wife of a doctor just across the road made it her business to welcome the newcomers, and the neighbors on either side of Ye Dene called; but, all the same, they made friends slowly.

Mrs. Whittaker made many and searching inquiries into the possibilities of education, and she finally concluded that she would send them to the High School, at which all the youth of the Park received their learning. So, morning after morning, the two quaint little figures set out from Ye Dene at a little after nine o’clock, returning punctually at half-past twelve and sallying forth again about a quarter-past two for the afternoon school, which lasted until four.

What queer, quaint little maids they were! Regina’s own curious taste in dress she did not reproduce in her children. She held lofty theories that little girls should not be made vain by curled hair and flounced frocks. Their hair was therefore cut close to their heads, as if they had been two boys, and they wore curious little Quaker-brown jackets and hoods, which gave them an air of having come out of the ark.

“I regard it as terrible that children, who should be wholly irresponsible and whose troubles will come soon enough, should ever have to think of the care of their clothes,” she said one day to the doctor’s wife across the road.

“For my part,” the lady replied, “I don’t think that you can too early inculcate a proper care of the person into little girls. My own child, who was ten last week, is as particular about the fit and style of her clothes as I am about mine. If you bring girls up, dear lady, to run quite wild, do you not think that you do away with their domesticity, that most precious quality of all women?”

“I am only too anxious to do away with their domesticity,” said Mrs. Whittaker, quietly but very firmly. “You see, Mrs. M’Quade, I am no ordinary woman myself. I have had the education of a man. I have a man’s brain. I believe that in the near future the position of women will be entirely altered.”

“Then you are going to bring your girls up to professions?”

“I am going to bring my girls up to follow the natural bent of their minds. If they show any aptitude for and desire to follow one of the learned professions, neither their father nor I will put any stumbling-block in their way.”

“I see. Have you pushed them on already?”

“No, that is altogether against my principles. I never do anything against my principles. I think that all children should reach the age of seven years before they imbibe any learning, except such as comes through the eye and in a perfectly natural and simple manner. After the age of seven, until ten years old, I believe that lessons should be of the simplest and most harmless description. After that, the brain is strong and is better able to bear forcing.”

“I see. Well, your plan may be a good one; my plan may be a good one. I sent my little girl to a kindergarten when she was four years old, because she was lonely; she was not happy, she was always bored, always wanting somebody to play with her, and she yearned for playmates and little occupations. When she went to the kindergarten, she took to it like a duck to water. She loved her school then, and now that she is in a more advanced class, she is well on with her studies.”

“I see. And you dress her very elaborately?”

“Oh no, not elaborately,” said Mrs. M’Quade. “I always try to dress her daintily and smartly, but never elaborately.”

“It is not in accordance with my principles,” said Regina, loftily. “I have a set fashion for my children, and I intend to keep them to it until they are old enough to choose for themselves. Then they will take to the task of dressing themselves with minds untrammeled by the opinions of other people, even of their own mother. I have always tried so to bring up my girls as to make them thoroughly original in every possible way. They are not quite like other children. They are children as much out of the ordinary as their mother was before them; convention has no part, and shall have no part in their lives whatsoever. Indeed, I may say that conventions is one of the greatest bugbears of my existence.”

“But we must have conventions,” said the doctor’s wife.

“Must we?” said Mrs. Whittaker, with a superior smile. “Ah, I see that you and I, dear Mrs. M’Quade, must agree to differ. Let me give you some tea. I assure you it is quite conventional tea.”

“Thank you very much,” said Mrs. M’Quade, smiling.

In retailing the conversation to her husband that evening, Mrs. M’Quade remarked that it was quite conventional tea. “I should think about one-and-twopence a pound,” was her comment.

“And how did you like the lady?” her husband asked.

“She is an extraordinary woman, a very extraordinary woman. I don’t know that I like her; on the other hand, I don’t know whether there is anything about her to dislike.”

“What age—what size—what sort of a woman is she?” he asked.

“In age something over forty; in person plump and rather comely. A large, solid woman, with no idea of making the best of herself. She had a tea-gown on to-day that would have made the very angels weep.”

“Would any tea-gown make the angels weep?”

“I think that one would. It was a dingy brown and a salmon-pink. Wherever it was brown you wished it was salmon-pink, and wherever it was salmon-pink you wished it was brown, except when you were wishing that it was black altogether, without any relief at all.”

“Dear me! What was it like?”

“Well, it was just the one garment that she should never have worn. She wears old-fashioned stays, and though people may think they don’t matter in a tea-gown, I think stays have more effect on the general cut of a tea-gown than they have on any other garment. I should like to have dressed that lady in a plain coat and skirt from my own tailor, with a loose white front, and a good black hat. But I don’t think anybody would know her.”

“Well, it’s no business of yours, little woman,” said the doctor, cheerily. “And, after all, it’s a new family—children—infantile diseases—servants—people apparently thoroughly well-to-do. Bought the house—done it up inside and out. It isn’t for you and I to quarrel with our bread and butter.”

CHAPTER IV

SKATING ON THIN ICE

Was it, I wonder, a mother who first evolved the proverb: “Where ignorance is bliss ’twere folly to be wise”?

It cannot be said that as a family the inhabitants of Ye Dene were a success at Northampton Park. I have already said that they made friends slowly, and in saying so I was of course speaking of Mr. and Mrs. Whittaker and not of the children. The children, on the contrary, made friends very quickly and as quickly got through them. I doubt indeed if two more unpopular children had ever attended the Northampton Park High School. Fortunately for them, I mean for their peace of mind as the time went by, Mrs. Whittaker was not aware of the real reason for this state of affairs.

“I hear,” she remarked one day to long-legged Maud, who had been for a couple of years advanced to the dignity of a pigtail, “I hear that Gwendoline Hammond had a party yesterday.”

Maudie went very red and looked extremely uncomfortable. “I—I—did hear something about it,” she stammered.

“How was it that you were not asked?” inquired Regina, with an air very much like that of a porcupine suddenly shooting its quills into evidence.

“Oh, Gwendoline Hammond is a mean little sneak!” burst out Julia, who was much the bolder of the sisters.

“A sneak? How a sneak? What had she to sneak about?” demanded Regina.

“Well, it was like this, mother. Gwendoline is an awful bully, you know, and poor little Tuppenny was being frightfully bullied by her one day, and she’s a dear little thing, she can’t take care of herself—somebody’s got to stand up for her—and Maudie punched her head.”

“Punched her head! And what was she doing?”

“Well, she was twisting poor little Tuppenny’s arm around.”

“What! That mere child? And Gwendoline head and shoulders taller than she?”

“Yes.”

“And you say Maudie—punched her head?”

“Yes, and she punched it hard, too. And then Gwendoline went blubbering home, and Mrs. Hammond came to Miss Drummond, and—” Well, really, my reader, I hesitate to say what happened next, but as this is a true chronicle I had better make the plunge and get it over and done with—“and then,” said Julia, solemnly, “there was the devil to pay!”

“You had better not put it in that way,” said Regina, hurriedly. I must confess that she had the greatest difficulty to choke down a laugh. “You had better not put it in that way. ‘The devil to pay’ is next door to swearing itself, to say nothing of being what a great many people would call excessively vulgar; and if you were heard to say such a thing at school, you would get yourselves into dreadful trouble, and me too. I shall be obliged, Julia, if you will not use that expression again.”

“Very well, mother,” said Julia, with an air of great meekness, which, I may say in passing, she was far from feeling.

“With regard,” went on Regina in her most magnificent manner, “with regard to Gwendoline Hammond and her miserable party, I consider it distinctly a feather in your cap, Maudie, that you were left uninvited. If it were told to me, as I presume it was told to Mrs. Hammond, that one of you had been brutally cruel to a child many sizes smaller than yourself and incapable of self-defence, I should mete out the severest punishment that it was possible for me to give you. You have never been punished, because it has never been necessary. Some mothers,” she continued, “would punish you for using such a term as ‘the devil to pay.’ I regard that as a venial offence which your own common-sense will teach you is inexpedient as a phrase for everyday conversation. But brutal cowardice is a matter which I should find it very difficult to forgive, and I am extremely proud that you should have taken the part of a poor little child who was not able to do it for herself. I shall tell your father when he comes home, and I shall ask him to reward you in a suitable manner; and meantime, when I see Miss Drummond—”

“If you please, mother,” broke in Julia, who was, as I have said, the dominant one of the two sisters, “if you please, mother, just drop it about Miss Drummond. We are quite able to fight our own battles at school—we don’t want Miss Drummond, or anybody else, to think that we come peaching to you telling you everything. We tell you because we are fond of you and you ask, and—and—we don’t like to lie to you.” She stammered a little, because on occasion no one could tell a prettier lie than Julia Whittaker. “In fact,” ended Julia, “our lives wouldn’t be worth living if it was known that we came peaching home.”

“It is your duty to tell me everything,” said Regina.

“Well, you might say the same about Gwendoline Hammond,” remarked Julia, with a matter-of-fact air.

“You are within your right,” said Mrs. Whittaker; “you are within your right. I apologize.”

“Oh, please don’t do that,” said Julia, magnanimously; “it isn’t at all necessary. But you please won’t say anything to Miss Drummond about it—not unless she should speak to you, which she won’t. She was very indignant with Gwendoline when she found the whole truth out, and I believe she—at least I did hear that she paid a special visit to Mrs. Hammond and made things extremely unpleasant for Gwendoline. I don’t wonder she didn’t ask Maudie to her party, because her father happened to be there, and he was very angry about it. He almost stopped her having her party altogether, only Mrs. Hammond had asked some people and she did not like to go back upon her word and disgrace Gwendoline before everybody. So you understand, mother, not a word, please, to Miss Drummond.”

“My dear child,” said Regina, “my dear original, splendid child!”

Julia coughed. She would have liked to have taken the praise to herself, but with Maudie standing open-mouthed at her side it was not altogether feasible. She coughed again. “You—you forget Maudie,” she remarked mildly.

“My dear, noble, generous child! I forget nothing—and I will forget nothing for either of you. Here,” she went on, in ringing accents which would have brought down the house if Regina had been speaking at any public meeting, “is a small recognition from your mother, and at dinner-time to-night your father shall speak to you.”

“I think,” remarked Julia, ten minutes later, when she and her sister were on the safe ground of that part of the garden which belonged exclusively to them, “I think we got out of that uncommonly well, Maudie, don’t you?”

“Yes, but it was skating on thin ice,” said Maudie. “I don’t know how you dared, Ju. You told mother you didn’t like telling lies!”

“Well,” said Julia, “it is to be hoped it will never come out, for if it does there will be the devil to pay and no mistake about it.”

It was as well for Regina’s peace of mind that the thin ice never broke, and that the actual truth never came to light. You know what the poet says—“A lie that is half a lie is ever the hardest to fight.” Well, the same idea holds good for a truth that is half a truth. I don’t say that Julia’s account of the difference between themselves and Gwendoline Hammond was wholly a lie, but it was certainly not wholly the truth; indeed, it was such a garbled account that nobody concerned therein but would have found it difficult to recognize it.

“Wasn’t mother’s little sermon about the devil to pay lovely?” said Julia, swinging idly to and fro while Maudie stood contemplating her gravely.

“Yes,” said Maudie, “but she was quite right. That’s the best of mother—she’s always so full of sound common-sense.”

“Except when she calls you her brave, noble child!” rejoined the sharp wit.

“I don’t know,” said Maudie, reflectively, “that that was altogether mother’s fault.”

“Perhaps it wasn’t. It will be just as well for you and for both of us as far as that goes, if mother doesn’t happen to just mention the matter to Tuppenny’s mother. I think I was a fool not to have safeguarded that point.”

“There’s time enough,” said Maudie. “You can lead up to it when you go in, because, you know, Ju, if they ever do find out—”

“Yes, there will be the devil to pay,” put in Julia. “You are quite right.”

It was astonishing how sweet a morsel the phrase seemed to be to the child.

“You’ll get saying it to Miss Drummond,” said Maudie, warningly.

“Well, if I do,” retorted Julia, “I shall have had the pleasure of saying it—that will be something.”

Now this was but one of many similar instances which occurred during the childhood of Regina’s two girls. They were so sharp—at least Julia was—and as she was devoted to Maudie, she always put her wits at the service of her sister, and the other children whom they knew not unnaturally resented the fact that they were invariably to be found in the wrong box in any discussion in which the Whittaker children had a share. So they became more and more isolated as the years went by.

“Why don’t we like the Whittakers?” said a girl to her mother, who had met Mrs. Whittaker and thought her a very remarkable woman. “Well, because we don’t.”

“Yes, but why?”

“Oh, well, we don’t exactly know why—but we don’t. They’re queer.”

Have you noticed, dear reader, how frequent it is to set down those who are too sharp for you as “queer?” Well, it was just so at Northampton Park, and what the girl didn’t choose to put into plain words, she stigmatized as queer.

“And what do you mean by queer?” the mother asked.

“Well, they are queer. I think their mother must be queer, too, because their dress is so funny.”

“Is it?”

“Oh, awfully. They always wear brown.”

“What are they like?”

“Well, Maudie is fairish and Julia is darkish. Maudie has quite a straight nose and Julia’s turns up—oh, it isn’t an ugly turn-up nose, I didn’t mean that. But they are such guys, and what is worse, they don’t care a bit.”

“Really? What sort of guys?” asked the mother, who was immensely amused.

“Well, they never have anything like anybody else. They’ve got long, pokey frocks made of tough brown stuff, like—er—like—er—pictures of Dutch children. And over them they wear long holland pinafores.”

“It sounds very sensible,” remarked the mother. “And when they come out of school?”

“In the winter they’ve got long brown coats, with little bits here—you know.”

“You mean a yoke?”

“I don’t know what you call it, mother—little bits, and skirts from it, and poke bonnets, and brown wool gloves; brown stockings and brown shoes, and little brown muffs. Oh, they really are awfully queer!”

“And in the summer?”

“In the summer? Well, in the summer they wear brown holland things. They’re queer, mother, I can’t tell you any more—they’re queer.”

“I see,” said the mother. “But in themselves,” she persisted, “what are they like in themselves?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Nobody likes them much.”

“Poor children! I wish you would be a little kind to them.”

“Do you?” said the girl, rather wistfully. “Well, I will if you like, but it would be an awful bore, and they wouldn’t thank us.”

“I see,” said the mother. But she was wrong; she only thought she saw.

So time sped on, and these two children grew more and more long-legged, more and more definite in character, and as they progressed towards what Mrs. Whittaker fondly believed to be originality and unconventionalism, so did her mother’s heart bound and yearn within her.

“I am amply satisfied with the result of our scheme of education,” she was wont to say. “No, it is not easy—it is much easier to bring up children in the conventional way. But the result—oh, my dear lady, the result, when you feel a thrill of pride that your children are different to others, is worth the sacrifice.”

“Now I wonder what,” said the lady in question in the bosom of her family, “did that foolish woman particularly have to sacrifice? The general feeling in the Park seems to be that the Whittakers are horrid children—disagreeable, ill-bred, sententious, and altogether ridiculous; too sharp in one way, too stupid for words in another. And yet she talks about sacrifice!”

“Oh, Maudie isn’t sharp—at least, not particularly so,” said her own girl, who, being a couple of years older than Maudie Whittaker, knew fairly well the lie of the land. “Julia’s sharp—a needle isn’t in it. It’s Julia who backs Maudie up in everything, and Julia is a horrid little beast whom everybody hates and loathes. She tried it on with me once when I was at school, but I soon put the young lady in her right place with a good setting down, and she never tried it on any more. They’d have been all right if they had been properly brought up, which they weren’t.”

“You think not?”

“Oh no, mother. You have no idea how intensely silly Mrs. Whittaker is.”

“Is she? I thought she was such a brilliant woman.”

“I believe she calls herself so; nobody else agrees with her.”

“Do you know what I heard about Mrs. Whittaker only yesterday?” said the mother, with a sudden gleam of remembrance. “She has gone in for public speaking. They say it’s too killing for words.”

“Speaking on what?” asked the girl.

“On the improvement of the condition of women.”

“What! a political affair?”

“No, no; not political at all; a something quite disconnected with politics—quite above them. She has been chosen President of a new society which is to be called ‘The Society for the Regeneration of Women.’”

CHAPTER V

THE S.R.W.

Why is it that women are so fond of founding societies both for the improvement of themselves and of each other? Is it a confession of weakness, or is it one of the signs of the coming of the millenium?

Mrs. Whittaker was a woman who never did things by halves. She distinctly prided herself thereupon.

“If a thing, my dear, is worth doing,” I heard her say about the time of which I am writing, “it is worth doing well. I have great faith—although I have gone so far above the old-world thoughts of religion—in the verse which says: ‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might.’ It is a grand precept, one that I instil into my children—er—er—”

“For all you are worth,” remarked a flippant young woman who was listening.

“I—I shouldn’t have expressed it in that way,” stammered Regina, somewhat taken aback. “But—but—er—it’s what I mean.”

“And your children, are they the same?”

“Yes, I am proud to say that my children are very much like me in that respect. When they play, they play; when they work, they work; when they idle they idle; and I am sure if ever they were naughty, that they would be naughty with all their might.”

Poor Regina! Well, to make the story somewhat shorter, I must tell you that when Regina Whittaker went into public life, she did so in no half-hearted manner.

“I am convinced,” she remarked to the lord of her bosom, “I am convinced that I am taking a step in the right direction. What do you think, Alfie?”

“My dear,” said Alfred Whittaker, somewhat sleepily, for he had had a hard day in the city and had eaten an extremely good dinner, “if it pleases you, it pleases me. You have such a clear, sensible head,” he went on, feeling that perhaps he had been a little too unsympathetic, “you have such a clear, sensible head, that I am sure you will take up no question that is not a good one—an advantageous one.”

“I thought you would see it in that light, dear Alfie,” said Mrs. Whittaker in tones which betokened much pleasure. “You are so generous and so just. Some men would hate to feel that their wives had any interest outside their own homes.”

“Oh, my dear heart and soul!” exclaimed Alfred Whittaker, looking up in a very wide-awake sort of way, “surely this is a land of liberty. I don’t want to tie you down to being no better than my slave. God knows you fag enough and slave enough for all of us. It would be hard if you couldn’t have a few opinions and a few interests of your own.”

“Yes, dear; but it isn’t quite that. It is not only of opinions that I am speaking, it is the encouraging way in which you consent to my entering on this somewhat pronounced question.”

“I have absolute faith in your judgment,” said Alfred Whittaker; and again he composed himself for his after-dinner nap.

Regina sat looking at him as he slumbered. Her heart was very full, for she was an affectionate woman, and, in spite of her little airs and pretensions, she was really a good woman at bottom. Her heart swelled with pride to think that this was her husband, this handsome, portly, dignified man with a presence, an air of being somebody, this man who was so good, so easy to live with, such a good husband and such an affectionate father. And to think that he was hers! As I have said already, her heart thrilled within her.

It was true that others might not have agreed with Regina in her estimate of her husband. The outer world might have thought him anything but handsome, might have thought that he had anything rather than a presence. What Regina called portly, a less tender critic might have described in an extremely unpleasant manner; but, you see, Regina looked at him with eyes of possession, and the eyes of possession are ever somewhat biassed.

So her thoughts ran pleasantly on. Yes, it was indeed sweet to be so blessed as she was in her home life. She had once believed that her life was a wasted one. Well, that was in the foolish days, before she had tried her wings. Not that she ever regarded her flights into the world of higher thought with the very smallest regret; that could never be. Enlightenment is always enlightenment, whether it is actually paying in a monetary sense or not. She firmly believed that an elaborate and somewhat masculine education had enabled her to become a better wife and mother than she would have been had she been contented with the genteel education which her parents had thought good enough, further than which indeed their minds had never attempted to fly. Perhaps, her thoughts ran, her mission in life was to bring enlightenment to the minds of other women, in a somewhat different way to that which she had hitherto accepted as the most reasonable. Be that as it may, Regina entered upon her duties as President of the S.R.W., armed with the full sanction of her husband’s permission and approval.

To all her friends she was an amazing and, at the same time, an amusing study about this epoch.

“I am perfectly certain,” remarked Mrs. M’Quade to the mother of the little girl who at school was called Tuppenny, “I am perfectly certain that Mrs. Whittaker has at last found her metier. Are you going to join her scheme for the regeneration of women?”

“I don’t think so,” replied the lady who lived at Highthorn. “My husband is so very sneering when anything of the kind is mentioned. I shouldn’t mind for myself; I think it would be rather fun. They are going to have tea-parties and soirées, and all sorts of amusements. But George would be so full of his fun, that I don’t feel somehow it would be good enough for me to go into. Besides, it’s three guineas a year. As far as I can tell,” she continued, “from what Mrs. Whittaker has told me, there won’t be any real regeneration of women in our day. It may come in the day of our grandchildren, but I don’t feel inclined to work for that.”

“That shows a great want of public spirit,” remarked the doctor’s wife, laughingly.

“Yes, I daresay it does, but I don’t believe women are public-spirited, except here and there—generally when they have made a failure of their own lives, as my old man always says.”

“But Mrs. Whittaker hasn’t made a failure of her life.”

“Well, she has and she hasn’t. She has failed to become anything very much out of the ordinary. She is very fond of calling herself an unconventional woman who never does anything like anybody else, but I fail to see very much in it excepting that she makes horrible guys of her girls.”

“Well, I am going to join the society,” said Mrs. M’Quade, with the air of one who is prepared to receive ridicule. “No, I don’t pretend for a moment that I want regenerating myself—or even that other women do—but Mrs. Whittaker has been a very good patient to the doctor one way and another, and she’s stuck to us, and I think the least I can do is to join her pet scheme—and, mind you, it is a pet scheme.”

“I call that absolutely Machiavellian,” said her friend.

“Oh, a doctor’s wife has to be Machiavellian, my dear, and a thousand other things,” said Mrs. M’Quade, easily. “I have been fifteen years in the Park, and I have kept in with everybody—never had a wrong word with a single one of Jack’s patients. You may call it Machiavellian, and doubtless you are right, but I call it ripping good management myself.”

“So it is, my dear, so it is. And you shall have the full credit of it,” said Tuppenny’s mother, who was a genial soul and loved a joke as well as most people.

And Regina meantime was taking life with considerable seriousness. She fell into a habit of speaking of the S.R.W. as of her life’s work; indeed, she became a very important woman. No sooner was it known that she was an excellent and dominant President of the S.R.W. than she came into request for other societies of a kindred nature—no, I don’t mean societies solely for the regeneration of women, not a bit of it. There was one for the sensible education of children between three and seven years old, whose committee she was asked to join not many weeks after the birth of the S.R.W.; and there was another society which bore the name of “The Robin Redbreast,” and provided the poor children of a south London district with dinners for a halfpenny a head, and a number of others that they provided with dinners for nothing at all. Then there was a Shakespeare Society, which had long existed in the Park, and which until Regina became a full-blown president had never thought of asking her to come on to its committee.

Now all this took Regina a good deal away from her home, and the result of her absence and of these wider interests in life was that the two girls at Ye Dene were enabled to shape their lives very much more in their own way than ever they had done before. Regina had, it is true, always aimed at inculcating a spirit of independence in her children. She required them to do certain things during the course of the day, to be punctual at meals, especially at breakfast, to report themselves when they were going to school and when they returned; but otherwise, she left them fairly free to spend the rest of their time as their own inclinations led them. They had their own sitting-room and their own tea-table, at which they could invite any children belonging to their school, or indeed, for the matter of that, any of the children living in the Park; and up to the advent of the S.R.W. it must be owned that this system worked as well as any system could have worked with children of such pronounced characters as the young Whittakers. But after their mother became a public woman, Maudie and Julia may be said to have run absolutely wild. No longer did they report themselves in the old way, because they had a very complete contempt for servants, and there was usually no one else to whom they could report themselves.

“Does your mother never want to know where you are?” asked a schoolfellow when Maudie was just sixteen.

“Well, yes, we always tell her at night what we have done during the day.”

“Oh, do you?”

“Yes,” returned Maudie. “Mother is most deeply interested in all our doings. Did you think she wasn’t? How funny of you! Isn’t your mother interested in what you do?”

“Oh yes, of course mine is. But then mine is rather different to yours. Mine is not a public character.”

“Well, I don’t know that our mother is exactly a public character,” said Julia, who was keenly on the watch for a single word which would in any way pour ridicule or contempt upon her mother.

“Oh yes, she is. Father says she’s a philanthropist.”

“Oh, does he? Well, I don’t know I’m sure. Perhaps she is. I know she’s a jolly hard-worked woman, and if she wasn’t as clever as daylight she wouldn’t be able to keep going as she does. As for her being a philanthropist—well, after all, what is a philanthropist?”

“Well, I did ask father, and he explained it, but he didn’t make it very clear. It seems to be a sort of person who goes about doing good.”

“That’s mother all over,” said Maudie.

“Then who mends your stockings?” asked Evelyn Gage.

“Our stockings? Why, mother has never mended our stockings. Sewing is one of the things mother isn’t great on. You couldn’t expect it.”

“Why not? Mine does.”

“Oh, yes, but our mother is rather different. You see, she was educated like a man.”

“How funny!” giggled Evelyn.

“I think,” said Maudie to Julia, half an hour later, when Evelyn Gage had gone home and the two were getting out their lesson-books for their home work, “I think it would be rather funny to have a mother like an ordinary woman, don’t you, Ju?”

“Well, I don’t know,” returned Julia. “Evelyn’s mother makes jam and pickles and pastry and lovely little rock cakes, and things that our mother never seems to think of. She is always too much taken up with great questions to bother herself with little etceteras, as old nurse always called such things.”

“Perhaps, though, we should find it rather a bore to have a mother who worried about our stockings and things, just an ordinary, average kind of mother. But anyway, we haven’t got a mother like that, so we must make the best of what we have got.”

CHAPTER VI

REGINA’S VIEWS