“I had a wife, once,” he said in joke to the doctor, one night when the M’Quades were dining at Ye Dene; “but now I often think I’ve only got a Chairman of Committee.”
Nevertheless, he said it with an air of pride, and later, when Regina asked him seriously whether he would prefer that she should give up her public duties and once more merge her identity into his, he exclaimed, “God forbid! What makes you happy, my dear, makes me happy, as long as you still regard me as the linch-pin of your existence.”
“I do, my dear Alfie, I do,” she cried. “Indeed I’m the same Queenie that you married all those years ago. My heart has never altered or changed in the very least. No other man has ever crossed its threshold since you first took possession of it.”
“As long as you feel that, my dear girl,” he returned, putting his arm about her ample waist and looking at her with fond eyes of loving, if somewhat sleepy, devotion, “as long as you feel like that, you can do what work you like and have what interests you like. And good luck go with you, for I am sure you must be a great comfort to a good many people.”
And Regina did work, like the traditional negro slave. Still, she never neglected her home duties. Regularly every week she wrote to her girls, and sometimes when she was dog-tired and found her eyes closing over the sheet on which she was writing, she shook herself quite fiercely, and reminded herself of her duty; then blamed herself passionately that her letters to her girls, her own girls, who thought of her, loved her, trusted her, made her the recipient of their hopes, doubts and fears, joys and pleasures, and even such simple sorrows as had as yet entered into their lives, should ever have come to be a duty—a mere duty.
Poor Regina! I will not pretend that the two girls never wished to hear from their mother, or that they would not have been bitterly disappointed had she wholly and totally neglected them; but they were happy in their school life, and they did not spend their time watching for the arrival of the facteur de poste, as Regina fondly believed of them. No, they quietly accepted their mother’s letters when they received them, read them, discussed them, and then put them on one side to think about them no more.
So time went on until the Christmas holidays arrived. The two girls did not come home to the Park for their vacation, but their father and mother made a little break in their respective callings and went to Paris, where the girls joined them at a modest but comfortable boarding-house.
Now the boarding-house had been recommended by the lady of the school at which the sisters were being educated. It was one kept by a French lady, to which but few English people were in the habit of going. Of the charming language of our neighbors across the Channel, Alfred Whittaker did not know one word beyond a form of salutation which he called bong jour! and an equally useful word which he was pleased to call messy. These two old people were therefore absolutely at the mercy of their young daughters; and the young daughters themselves thanked Heaven many times, during the three weeks which they passed together in Paris, that French had not been included in the curriculum of either their father’s or mother’s education. Oh, they meant no harm, don’t think it for a moment. There was no harm in either the one or the other. They were modern, human girls, into whom a life of independence had been instilled as a religion. Independent their mother wished them to be, and independent they were to an abnormal and an aggressive degree. They were as sharp as needles, exactly as their old schoolfellow had said years before; they had acquired a knowledge of Paris which was simply extraordinary considering that they had been immured in a pensionnat for demoiselles. They knew all the great emporiums quite intimately, and having extracted some money from their father on the score that it was no use their mother coming to Paris without buying clothes, and also that their own wardrobes required renewing, they whisked their mother from the Louvre, to the Bon Marché, from the Bon Marché to the Mimosa, and even got wind of that wonderful old market down in the Temple, where the Jews hold high revel between the hours of nine o’clock in the morning and noon.
What a time it was. “My girls,” said Regina to an elderly English lady with whom she foregathered in one of the pretty little white crêmeries in the Rue de la Paix, “speak French like natives. I was educated in all sorts of ways—I have taken degrees and done all sorts of things that most women don’t do—but when you put me down in Paris, I am utterly undone. I never realized before what a terrible thing want of education is.”
“And yet you have taken degrees,” said the lady, admiringly.