“I shouldn’t dream of doing that, it isn’t likely. I might make a slip myself one day, so I am not going to point out the slips of other people.” Which, considering the very near shave the young gentleman had had of making the very same slip not ten minutes before, might be considered a very feeling remark.
Meantime Regina had gone blindly along the arcade. She was dressed in summer garments, and not a few very curious glances were cast at her. Twice she stopped to look in shop windows with eyes that saw nothing. The first was a gunsmith’s, and the second was a man’s window of a distinguished bootmaker’s. Regina never knew the exact objects at which she had gazed during that painful peregrination. When she got to the end of the arcade she turned and walked back again, and all the time there beat to and fro in her brain an idea which said that Alfred, her noble Alfred, had gone after other gods—after other gods! Well, in the worst trials of life, in the griefs and shocks and sorrows of the newest and most unaccustomed kind, a woman cannot walk up and down a fashionable arcade forever. When she again reached the entrance by which she had gone in, it occurred to her that she must sit down and think—she must go somewhere where she could be quiet, where she could face this new sensation which had come into her life. Her club? No, not her club. She would meet there women who were interested in the same work as herself. If she lunched, and she could not be there in the lunch hour without lunching, someone would join her. There was a little pastry-cook’s where she sometimes lunched when she was in a hurry; she had never seen anybody there she knew, she would go there. To eat! No—no!—not to eat! Regina Whittaker was sure that she would never eat with relish again. So she bent her steps toward this little side-street haven, and, like all women in dire trouble, ordered tea and a muffin!
CHAPTER XVII
REGINA COMES TO A CONCLUSION
Have you ever noticed how accurately women judge from small circumstances. Men call this intuition, and men think of intuition as being on the same level as instinct.
If Regina had ordered a plate of soup it would have been brought to her immediately, because at one o’clock that comestible would have been ready and awaiting the wishes of customers. But Regina, as I have said, like most women in trouble, ordered the food and drink that were nearest her heart, and therefore she had to wait while the tea was brewed and the muffin toasted. The waiting did her good. She was alone, as it happened, in the comfortable room over the shop, and thus she was able to grasp the situation more clearly than she had done while still talking to the jeweler’s assistant, when she had had to consider the ordinary conventions of existence. Poor Regina! She sat there by the tall mantelshelf and stared at the paper roses which filled the summer grate. Her Alfred, her noble Alfred, had fallen from his pedestal—he was hers no longer! In all the years of their married life, indeed in their knowledge of each other, she had never wronged Alfred by even so much as a doubt of his nobility. To her he had been noble, truly noble, kind, affectionate, dignified and a highly successful man—and now all was over; her house of matrimony had fallen about her ears like a pack of cards—she had been supplanted by another. Truly Regina’s thoughts were very bitter. She had been supplanted by another—what was she going to do? It came to her memory that in times gone by, when other women had fallen upon evil days of a like description, she had helped to bear their sorrows with a very light heart. Well, it had not then entered her head that their portion might one day be hers; but now the blow had fallen upon herself, and she must perforce give herself the same advice that she had given to others. “My dear,” she had remarked once to a poor little woman whose husband had been spoiled by over-much adoration, “you have made one mistake in your life: you have been too good to that husband of yours. What? Nobody could be too good to him? You have, my dear, and it doesn’t do to be too good to a man for all time whether he behaves himself or not; it doesn’t do to put all your wares in your front window. Keep something back; let there be always some little corner of womanly dignity which men, even husbands, must respect.” “But, Mrs. Whittaker,” the little woman had replied, “I haven’t any dignity where Jack is concerned; I don’t want any dignity, I only want Jack, and he has gone away and left me.” How well she remembered the words as she sat alone in the pastry-cook’s shop in Regent Street, how well she remembered! Well, she felt very much as that little woman had felt—she did not care about her dignity any more; she only wanted Alfred, and if Alfred was deceiving her, if Alfred was living a double life and sharing his heart with another, she only wanted to go back to the blissful time of blind ignorance, when to her he had been the embodiment of manly dignity and robust virtue.
She got up and looked at herself in the long strip of glass which was set between the two tall windows. It was not a becoming glass, nor was it placed in a particularly becoming light, and Regina, who had been through a storm of tempestuous emotion, and who bore upon her strongly marked countenance the visible signs of her mental upheaval, looked, frankly speaking, quite hideous. At that moment the young lady who had taken her order for tea and muffin came into the room carrying a little tray, and Regina made a slight pretence of adjusting her hair before she went back to the table.
“Would you prefer to sit here, or by the window?”