How one admires a woman who takes an unexpected facer without making a scene!
Regina had come to the end of her period of martyrdom. Her weight was ten stones seven pounds, her waist was twenty-five inches. Her family had grown used to what both father and daughter stigmatized as “mother’s little vanities.” She was now a radiantly healthy, pleasing, well-dressed person of comely, middle-aged womanhood. It is true that she was hopelessly dependent upon Madame d’Estelle for her taste in dress and upon Madame Clementine for her choice of millinery. She was still an excellent customer at The Dressing-Room, and went there regularly to have her luxuriant hair brushed and waved in the fashion to which Alfred Whittaker and Julia no longer raised any objection. She had started a day at her club so that friends at a distance might take a cup of tea with her without journeying out to Northampton Park. She was not yet the chaperon of her daughter, for her daughter had long ago got into the habit of arranging her own life, but she was fully convinced that the new ways were a wide advance upon the old ways, and nothing would have induced her to go back to her original state of benighted self-sufficiency. Never had Regina Whittaker known herself so thoroughly as since she had become aware of the existence of the hussy. And yet, it must be confessed that although she had absolutely remodeled her life, changed her way of being, taken a new standpoint from which to look out upon the world, she was no nearer the consummation of her dearest hopes, she was no more certain than she had been six months before that the heart of Alfred was indisputably hers and hers alone.
“You are going to dine in town again!” she said to him one dreary winter morning.
“My dear girl, you may rest assured that I should not dine in town if there were the ghost of a chance of my being able to get my dinner here, but I shall not be back till late, and I don’t know why you and the child should ruin your dinner because I can’t get back in reasonable time.”
“But Maudie and Harry are coming.”
“I can’t help that; you must explain to them. My dear girl, there’s such a lot at stake just now that I simply dare not leave it to chance. Come, come, be reasonable. One would think,” and he smiled benevolently down upon her, “that we were a young couple like our turtle doves, and that one could not dine without the other. I admit that I shall not enjoy it so much.”
“Shall you not?”
“Now, how can I? Probably there isn’t a man in London who is fonder of his home than I am, but at the same time one wants to do the right thing by one’s home as well as to enjoy it.”
“But, Alfred, you don’t wish me to understand that the firm is in difficulties?”
“No, no, not in the sense you mean, but in another sense it is. The fact is, Queenie, I must stick to the ship now at whatever inconvenience to myself.”