“Stick in the mud!” echoed Maudie. “And this is all that has come of mother’s higher education!”
“Well, mother higher-educated herself. She made a huge mistake, and nobody knows it better than mother. She is up in all sorts of learned and abstruse subjects that she has never been able to turn to account in any shape or form, and the ordinary things that women ought to know she is perfectly ignorant of. Fancy setting mother to make a pie!”
“Fancy setting you to make a pie,” retorted Maudie.
“Oh, well, I’ve been thinking it wouldn’t be half a bad idea if we were to enter at the Park Polytechnic and take a course of dressmaking, another of millinery, another of cooking, and, for the matter of that, we might take a fourth at housekeeping.”
“How should we get it all in?”
“Oh, well, that’s easy enough. You pay two guineas a year, and you can join any class you like. The classes are going on all day long, so Rita Mackenzie tells me, and you pay sixpence each as a sort of entrance fee.”
“Then we couldn’t do that if we left Ye Dene.”
“Ah, but we sha’n’t leave Ye Dene to-day, nor to-morrow—I never thought of that for a moment. But if we once graft into the dad’s head that it is possible we may one day want to leave Ye Dene, he’ll put himself in the right channel for getting good offers for it. Don’t make any mistake about the value of Ye Dene. It’s freehold, it is in the main road, and it is in the best position in the main road. It’s in perfect repair inside and out. I don’t believe, if the dad was to put it in the hands of two or three good agents, that we should be here two months.”
“What is Rita Mackenzie going in for?”