CHAPTER XX
FAMILY CRITICISM
Sometimes it is a good thing to be aroused out of sleep, especially if the sleep has been a fool’s paradise.
Mrs. Whittaker crept softly out of the room, and went as softly out of the house. There was a pillar-box a little way along the road, and it was not an infrequent habit with her to carry her own letters to the post without troubling to make any sort of outdoor toilette. So on that soft summer night she gathered up her voluminous skirts, and with the letter in her hand went down the covered way to the gate and walked as far as the pillar-box.
“My dear,” said a neighbor, who had been to the club and was on his way home, as he entered the room where his wife was sitting, “I met Mrs. Whittaker just now. I never saw anything so remarkable.”
“Really! She’s always rather remarkable in her dress, but how?”
“I don’t know, but it was white; it looked like a voluminous exaggerated nightgown.”
“Mrs. Whittaker in a nightgown, Charley? She must have been out of her mind, or was she walking in her sleep, do you think?”