“But Mrs. Whittaker hasn’t made a failure of her life.”
“Well, she has and she hasn’t. She has failed to become anything very much out of the ordinary. She is very fond of calling herself an unconventional woman who never does anything like anybody else, but I fail to see very much in it excepting that she makes horrible guys of her girls.”
“Well, I am going to join the society,” said Mrs. M’Quade, with the air of one who is prepared to receive ridicule. “No, I don’t pretend for a moment that I want regenerating myself—or even that other women do—but Mrs. Whittaker has been a very good patient to the doctor one way and another, and she’s stuck to us, and I think the least I can do is to join her pet scheme—and, mind you, it is a pet scheme.”
“I call that absolutely Machiavellian,” said her friend.
“Oh, a doctor’s wife has to be Machiavellian, my dear, and a thousand other things,” said Mrs. M’Quade, easily. “I have been fifteen years in the Park, and I have kept in with everybody—never had a wrong word with a single one of Jack’s patients. You may call it Machiavellian, and doubtless you are right, but I call it ripping good management myself.”
“So it is, my dear, so it is. And you shall have the full credit of it,” said Tuppenny’s mother, who was a genial soul and loved a joke as well as most people.
And Regina meantime was taking life with considerable seriousness. She fell into a habit of speaking of the S.R.W. as of her life’s work; indeed, she became a very important woman. No sooner was it known that she was an excellent and dominant President of the S.R.W. than she came into request for other societies of a kindred nature—no, I don’t mean societies solely for the regeneration of women, not a bit of it. There was one for the sensible education of children between three and seven years old, whose committee she was asked to join not many weeks after the birth of the S.R.W.; and there was another society which bore the name of “The Robin Redbreast,” and provided the poor children of a south London district with dinners for a halfpenny a head, and a number of others that they provided with dinners for nothing at all. Then there was a Shakespeare Society, which had long existed in the Park, and which until Regina became a full-blown president had never thought of asking her to come on to its committee.
Now all this took Regina a good deal away from her home, and the result of her absence and of these wider interests in life was that the two girls at Ye Dene were enabled to shape their lives very much more in their own way than ever they had done before. Regina had, it is true, always aimed at inculcating a spirit of independence in her children. She required them to do certain things during the course of the day, to be punctual at meals, especially at breakfast, to report themselves when they were going to school and when they returned; but otherwise, she left them fairly free to spend the rest of their time as their own inclinations led them. They had their own sitting-room and their own tea-table, at which they could invite any children belonging to their school, or indeed, for the matter of that, any of the children living in the Park; and up to the advent of the S.R.W. it must be owned that this system worked as well as any system could have worked with children of such pronounced characters as the young Whittakers. But after their mother became a public woman, Maudie and Julia may be said to have run absolutely wild. No longer did they report themselves in the old way, because they had a very complete contempt for servants, and there was usually no one else to whom they could report themselves.
“Does your mother never want to know where you are?” asked a schoolfellow when Maudie was just sixteen.
“Well, yes, we always tell her at night what we have done during the day.”