A lady and her husband

by Amber Reeves Blanco White

Laura laughed.

[CHAPTER V]

IT was not until Mary, with her Miss Percival, had visited all the depots that she thought the moment had come for a conversation with James. Up to this time she had scarcely mentioned her activities to him. She did not wish to seem precipitate and she had felt, too, that constant references might worry him. But there was no reason now for putting it off any longer and every reason why the little reforms she had thought of should be carried through at once. She was planning, as well as these, a sort of convalescent home, a cottage by the sea where the palest, weakest girls might be given holidays. And she hoped, too, some day to suggest a system by which the girls should take turns to rest during the slack hours of the day. But she did not mean to say anything about that yet. Time enough when she had seen how James accepted the home and her other suggestions. She meant to ask him now for a better meal in the middle of the day, a nice room to eat it in, and proper regulation shoes. Also, though that might be impossible, where there were long flights of stairs there ought to be lifts for the trays. The matter of wages, in spite of Miss Percival's hints, she did not think important, as all the girls were being kept in their comfortable decent homes. Their wages, therefore, were merely pocket-money and it could not matter much that they had to pay for their fares to and from work and for the cuffs, caps, collars, and aprons supplied to them with the stuff for their black dresses, by the firm. They paid, too, for any food which they ate on the premises; the managers charged them half price for goods which, though not exactly stale, had lost that first exquisite freshness demanded by customers. They paid fines for breaking the rules, and an insurance of sixpence a week against breakages. The firm, its inspectors told Mary, lost heavily over this, but then it was composed of kind-hearted men, and not of ogres.

Mary's investigation was not yet complete for both she and Miss Percival thought that they ought to see something of the girls' home lives. Miss Percival, whom Mary saw to be a suspicious person, did not seem to attach much importance to the manager's declarations that the girls all came from happy, well-to-do homes. But then Miss Percival had seen such terrible things and read so many books upon Socialism that she probably confused the Imperial with less conscientious firms. Mary, on James's advice, had read no books on the subject. James had said that what he wanted were the little mother's own wise little thoughts, not a hash-up of other people's opinions. And Mary had not formed the habit of going to books for information.

Now that the moment had come for a conversation she found herself shrinking a little from the criticism not only of James but of Trent. Trent had regarded her during these months with a disapproving air. He was suffering, Mary thought, from Lady Hester's mother, who, though she sometimes permitted his presence, had a way of successfully repressing his suit. And Trent's fondness for Lady Hester was based on just those qualities in her which would prevent her from rising to the vulgar heights of a row with her mother. Mary fancied that this source of irritation was blackening Trent's view of her own behaviour. If so, she did not see that she was bound to run the risk of annoying him further. To have Trent sitting there annoyed from the beginning would make her too nervous to do herself justice with James. She finally chose, therefore, a time when Trent was out. It was an evening when James had said that he had no work to do, and after dinner she collected Miss Percival's careful notes and went down into the study. The study was a more business-like room than her own or the drawing-room, and one less associated with moments of sentiment. She did not want James to be sentimental that night, she wanted him to be earnestly reasonable, to listen to her as if she were a man. She knew exactly what she meant to say, but she was afraid of being turned aside and only remembering her best points afterwards.

James was detached and good-humoured, perfectly ready to talk things over with her. He seemed to think that it was really very creditable that she should have stuck to the thing like this, and taken such an interest in it. One gets rather too much into the habit of assuming that women do not care about serious things. Well then, to what revolutionary courses did she—dear little person that she was—wish to commit her wretched husband and his old-fashioned business?

She told him that she thought it was a wonderful business—she did. It had touched her imagination, it had filled her with respect for men. This was what men could do when they bent their brains to women's work. Mary remembered her own early struggles with cook-generals on the battle-ground of tea-trays, the drillings, the chivyings, the exhortations, her triumph on days when the silver was clean and the cloth smooth and the bread and butter nicely cut. The making of the tea itself had been her own charge, that pouring of boiling water onto measured leaves was too delicate, too sacred, for the hired and casual fingers of a servant. But let a man turn his attention to the matter and straightway, at Chiswick, in the Strand, at Islington, he could command ten thousand tea-trays each with its pretty plate bearing three impeccable slices of brown bread and butter and three of white, with its six gay pastries elegantly set out, with its unvarying, unsurpassable cup of tea. Woman fussed and there was a table, more or less adequately equipped; man considered and he found a formula and a tradition to which tables conformed in their pleasant hospitality, here or a hundred miles away, yesterday or ten years hence. It seemed to Mary that few tasks could be more noble, more satisfying, than thus to provide a sovereign democracy with dainty and nourishing food. Now that she had seen his great work she could share in the pride that exalted James when he spoke of the bad old times when a single beefy beery meal cost more than you would spend nowadays on a week's supply of stimulating coffee and poached eggs on toast. It was no small thing, and she felt it, to be the wife of a man like James.

James accepted her admiration. It is pleasant, when you show your manhood's work to your wife, to find that she appreciates its greatness. "Found it clean, eh?" he asked her, in a tone that anticipated her reply.

She had not the heart to tell him that perfect cleanliness is inhuman; she relinquished too, her protest against the dubious eggs that made such light sponge-cakes. She must be a woman of business, the kitchens were not within the range of her inquiry. She must not depart from her proper sphere merely because she had seen a kitchen boy sticking his fingers into some dough and licking them clean. That might happen anywhere; it was one of the things that civilised people agree to ignore. So she told James that his business had given her quite new ideas of discipline and method. After all, practically everybody makes their sponge-cakes with eggs that you wouldn't use for boiling. James couldn't be expected to be quite different from anybody else. We all eat game.

James took that easily. "And now what is it we've got to do if we're not to forfeit the old lady's good opinion?" he asked.