And Julia, having the eye, did say where they were to go; in fact, with her own energetic hands she spread them about the room—crawling beetles, grinning devils, spotted cats with exaggerated green eyes, odds and ends of pottery, glass and porcelain.
“Do you think we need have that over-mantel enameled?” she asked Maudie at last.
“No, I should have it stained black—ebonized, that’s the word,” said Maudie, looking round. “As it is, the room is too new, too ornate, too dazzlingly modern. There isn’t a touch of shadow in it anywhere—it’s like a face without any eyelashes.”
CHAPTER XI
AMBITIONS
Many people look upon mental blindness as they do upon physical blindness—as a terrible affliction. Yet, when the mentally blind suddenly see, their condition is not usually improved thereby.
If the Whittaker girls had been unpopular as children, they certainly made up for it, so far as Northampton Park was concerned, when they became young women. The innovation of having an At Home day of their own, at which their mother made a point of not appearing, was so daring that every girl in the Park made it her duty to be present thereat, and when it was bruited abroad that it was really a girl’s At Home, with no overshadowing mothers and such like sober persons, that the girls had their own room and their own tea-things, and excellent provision in the way of cakes, and that cigarettes were allowed after six o’clock, then not only the girls, but also their brothers, soon came flocking into Ye Dene in considerable numbers. The whole winter did this state of things continue, until the At Home days at Ye Dene were no longer a nine days’ wonder but an established fact.
Then Maudie and Julia began to meet with other girls further afield than their own immediate vicinity, girls who were connections or friends of the girls who lived in the Park, and invitations began to shower in upon Regina’s daughters. They were perfectly independent—Regina wished them to be so, and prided herself on the fact that they were so—and as their comings and goings did not interfere with the comfort of their father, Alfred Whittaker saw nothing to which he could frame any reasonable objection in his daughters’ mode of life.