“Yes, Wady Halfa has its advantages, even in July,” said Uncle Dudley. “It is warm, and there are insects, but one is allowed by law to kill them—in Egypt.”
Illustrating the operation of Vegetables and Feminine Duplicity upon the Concepts of Maternal Responsibility
I FELT that I was on sufficiently intimate terms with Mrs Albert Grundy to tell her that she was not looking well. She gave a weary little sigh and said she knew it.
Indeed, poor lady, it was apparent enough. She has taken of late to wearing her hair drawn up from her forehead over a roll—the effect of mouse-tints at which Nature is beginning to hint, being frankly helped out by powder. Everybody about Fernbank recognises that in some way this reform has altered the whole state of affairs. The very servant who comes to the door, or who brings in the tea-things, seems to carry herself in a different manner since the change has been made. Of course, it is by no means a new fashion, but it was not until the Dowager Countess of Thames-Ditton brought it in person to Fernbank that Mrs Albert could be quite sure of its entire suitability. Up to that time it had seemed to her a style rather adapted to lady lecturers and the wives of men who write: and though Mrs Albert has the very highest regard for literature—quite dotes on it, as she says—she is somewhat inclined to sniff at its wives.
We all feel that the change adds character to Mrs Albert’s face—or rather exhibits now that true managing and resourceful temper, which was formerly obscured and weakened by a fringe. But the new arrangement has the defects of its qualities. It does not lend itself to tricks. The countenance beneath it does not easily dissemble anxiety or mask fatigue. And both were written broadly over Mrs Albert’s fine face. “Yes,” she said, “I know it.”
The consoling suggestion that soon the necessity of giving home-dinners to the directors in her husband’s companies would have ended, and that then a few weeks out of London, away somewhere in the air of the mountains or the sea, would bring back all her wonted strength and spirits, did no good. She shook her head and sighed again.
“No,” she said, “it isn’t physical. That is to say, it is physical, but the cause is mental. It is over-worry.”
“Of all people on earth—you!” I replied reproachfully. “Why think of it—a husband who is the dream of docile propriety, a competency broadening each year into a fortune, a home like this, such servants, such appointments, such a circle of admiring friends—and then your daughters! Why, to be the mother of such a girl as Ermyntrude———-”