Studies in Wives

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

There was one thing which Althea greatly envied Mrs. Panfillen, and that was nothing personal to herself; it was simply the tiny formal garden which divided the house in Old Queen Street from Birdcage Walk. This garden looked fresher and greener than its fellows because, by Mrs. Panfillen's care, the miniature parterres were constantly tended and watered, while the shrubs both summer and winter were washed and cleansed as carefully as was everything else likely to be brought in contact with their owner's wife.

In spite of the fact that they lived so very near to one another, the two women were not much together, and as a rule they only met, but that was, of course, very often, when out in the political and social worlds to which they both belonged.

Althea had a curious shrinking from the Panfillens' charming house. It was there, within a very few weeks of her father's death, that she had first met Perceval Scrope—and there that he had conducted his careless wooing. It was in Mrs. Panfillen's boudoir, an octagon-shaped room on the park side of the house, that he had actually made his proposal, and that Althea, believing herself to be "in love," and uplifted by the solemn and yet joyful thought of how happy such a marriage—her marriage to a member of the first Fair Food Cabinet—would have made her father, had accepted him.

From Old Queen Street also had taken place her wedding, which, if nominally quiet, because the bride still chose to consider herself in deep mourning, had filled St. Margaret's with one of those gatherings only brought together on such an occasion—a gathering in which the foemen of yesterday, and the enemies of to-morrow, unite with the friends of to-day in order to do honour to a fellow-politician.

Althea had darker memories connected with Mrs. Panfillen's house. She had spent there, immediately after her honeymoon, an unhappy fortnight, waiting for the workpeople to leave her future home in Delahay Street. It was during that fortnight that for the first time her girlish complacency had forsaken her, and she had been made to understand how inadequate her husband found her to the position she was now called upon to fill. It was then that there had first come to her the humiliating suspicion that her bridegroom could not forgive her his own sale of himself. Scrope and Joan Panfillen were subtle people, living in a world of subtleties, yet in this subtle, unspoken matter of Scrope's self-contempt concerning his marriage, the simple Althea's knowledge far preceded theirs.

In those days Joan Panfillen, kindest, most loyal of hostesses, had always been taking the bride's part, but how unkind—yes, unkind was the word—Perceval was, even then!

Althea had never forgotten one little incident connected with that time, and this afternoon she suddenly remembered it with singular vividness. Scrope had been caricatured in Punch as Scrooge; and—well—Althea had not quite understood.

"Good Lord!" he had exclaimed, turning to the older woman, "Althea doesn't know who Scrooge was!" and quickly he had proceeded to put his young wife through a sharp, and to her a very bewildering examination, concerning people and places some of whom she had never heard of, while others seemed vaguely, worryingly familiar. He had ended up with the words, "And I suppose you consider yourself educated!" A chance muttered word had then told her that none of these places were real—that none of these people Perceval had spoken of with such intimate knowledge, had ever lived!

Althea had felt bitterly angered as well as hurt. Tears had welled up into her brown eyes; and Mrs. Panfillen, intervening with far more eager decision than she generally showed about even important matters, had cried, "That's not fair! In fact you are being quite absurd, Perceval! I've never cared for Dickens, and I'm sure most people, at any rate most women, who say they like him are pretending—pretending all the time! I don't believe there's a girl in London who could answer the questions you put to Althea just now, and if there is such a girl then she's a literary monster, and I for one don't want to know her."

As only answer Scrope had turned and put a thin brown finger under Althea's chin. "Crying?" he had said, "Baby! She shan't be made to learn her Dickens if she doesn't want to, so there!"