The Little Vanities of Mrs. Whittaker: A Novel

E-text prepared by D Alexander and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
A Novel
AUTHOR OF
“ Bootles’ Baby ,” “ The Truth-Tellers ,” “ A Blaze of Glory ,” “ Marty ,” “ Little Joan ,” “ Cherry’s Child ,” “ A Blameless Woman ,” etc.

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.