“In a sense, dear Alfie, in a sense. But there is one question, dearest, that you must decide. How much is our wedding present to cost?”
“Well,” said Alfred, as he gave his face a final rub with the towel, “thank God I am able to give a hundred pounds for my girl’s wedding present, to give her a decent trousseau and to give her a decent dot. What you like to add to that is your own affair. There, now,” he said, as he threw the towel on the rail by the washstand, “I can’t waste another moment, I must get my tub, charming as your conversation always is.”
He whisked out of the room, a quaint figure enough in his demi-toilette. But Regina saw nothing quaint about her lord and master. “A handsome man with a presence,” was her usual description of him. But there are moments when the state of being which we describe as “a presence” has its grotesque aspects, and surely the flight to the bathroom is one of them. Mrs. Whittaker might have been the little blind god herself for all she saw of the grotesque in her noble Alfred.
“A hundred pounds,” she murmured, stopping in the process of arranging her hair for the day in order to rest the end of her hair brush on the edge of the toilet-table, and gazing at herself fixedly in the glass. “A hundred pounds! And, thank goodness, I can if need be put a hundred pounds of my own to it; I have only two darlings. I must consult Julia.”
Mrs. Whittaker took the earliest opportunity of a chat with her younger flower. It was not many minutes after Alfred Whittaker had departed for his office that a maid-servant came running across from Ingleside with a message to the effect that three large parcels had come for the bride, as she was affectionately called on both sides of the road, and would Miss Maudie please come across and open them, as the young ladies were dying to know what they contained. So Maudie disappeared in the direction of Ingleside, and Mrs. Whittaker seized the opportunity of broaching the important subject that was uppermost in her mind to Julia.
“Don’t go away, Julia,” she said, almost nervously.
“Yes, mother darling, what is the matter?”
“Nothing is the matter. But I want to consult you.”
“Oh,” said Julia, with a little air of conscious pride, “and what do you want to consult me about?”
“It is about our present—your father’s and mine.”