In the course of life one comes across so many people who are always yearning to go out into the world and do something, but Regina Brown was not a young woman who could or would content herself with mere yearning. With her to think was to do. With her a resolve was a fact practically accomplished.
“I will go in for the higher education,” she said to herself. “What do I know now? I can dance a little, play a little, paint a little. I know no useful things. My mother sews my clothes and makes my under-linen; my mother orders the dinner, and never will entrust the making of the pastry to any hand but her own. What is there left for me? Nothing! I must go out into the world. There is only one line in which I am likely to make success, and I am not the class of woman who makes for failure. I will become a great teacher. To become a great teacher, I must qualify myself. I must work, and work hard. I must enter at some regular school of learning, or, failing that, I must find a first-class tutor to work with me.”
Eventually Regina Brown adopted the latter course. As a matter of fact, she was not sufficiently advanced in any branch of education to enter at any school of learning which admitted women to its curriculum. To Regina it mattered little or nothing. For the next ten years she lived in an atmosphere of hard learning. She proved herself a worker of no mean ability. She passed all manner of examinations, she took numberless degrees, and on the day on which she was thirty years old, she found herself once more gazing at her face in the glass and wondering what she was going to do with the knowledge that she had so laboriously acquired.
“Regina Brown,” she said to herself, “you are no nearer to becoming a great teacher than you were ten years ago this very day. Will anyone ever put you in charge of a high school? Will anyone give you a responsible post in any of the spheres where women can prove that they are the equals, and more than the equals, of men? It is very doubtful. You know much, but you have no influence. Ten years ago to-day, Regina Brown, you told yourself that your mode of existence was a waste of life. Well, you are wasting your life still. The best thing you can do, Regina Brown, is to get yourself married.”
So Regina Brown got herself married.
Now, to put such an action in those words is not a romantic way of describing the most—or what should be the most—romantic episode of a woman’s life; but I use Regina’s own words, and I say that she got herself married.
She was not wholly unattractive. She had a pinky skin and frank grey eyes, but her figure was of the pincushion order, and much study had done away with that lissomness which is one of the most attractive attributes of womenkind. Her hands were white, strong, determined; white because they were mostly occupied about books and papers, strong because she herself was strong, and determined because it was her nature to be so. Her feet, frankly speaking, were large. She was a young woman who sat solidly on a solid chair, and looked thoroughly in place. Her features otherwise were neither bad nor good, and I think she was probably one of the worst dressers that the world has ever seen. It was no uncommon thing for Regina Brown to wear a salmon-pink ribbon twisted about her ample waist and to crown her toilet with a covering of turquoise blue.
It was about this time that Regina received a valentine—the first in her life. She held it sacred from any eye but her own, in fact she put it into the fire before any of the family had time to see it. The words ran thus:—
“Regina Brown, Regina Brown,
You think yourself a beauty;
In pink and green
And yellow sheen
You go to do your duty.
Regina Brown, Regina Brown,
Whenever will you learn
That pink and green
And golden sheen
Are colors you should spurn?
Regina Brown, Regina Brown,
Take lesson from the lily,
A lesson meek,
Not far to seek,
’Twill keep you from being silly!”
I cannot truthfully say that the valentine did Regina the smallest amount of good. You know, my gentle reader, if we only look at things the right way, we can find good in everything. As some poet has beautifully put it in a couplet about sermons in stones and running brooks—“And good in everything,” Regina might even have found good out of that malicious and spiteful valentine with its excellent likeness, done in water colors, of herself clad in weird and wonderful garments, the like of which even she had never attempted. But Regina consigned it to the flames, and went on her way precisely as she had done before, for Regina was a woman of strong nature and settled convictions. I give you this piece of information because you will find by the story which I shall tell and you will read, that this curious dominance of nature proved to be one of the mainsprings of this remarkable character.