“Oh, where have you been before, Sarah,” Aunt Gerty sighed, “not to know that a society lie can’t let any one in for hell fire? Well, it is too late now; they have gone. And it was rather a shabby turnout for aristocratic swells like that, after all.”
“They didn’t really want to see me,” said Mother. “They only called on me to please George. He sent them probably. I have heard him speak of Lady Fylingdales. He stays there. She is one of his oldest friends. She is lame and nearly blind. Lady Scilly I shall never like from what I have heard of her. Tempe, run in the garden in the sun and dry your hair. Off you go!”
“And get a sunstroke,” thought I. “Just because she wants to talk to Aunt Gerty about the grand callers!”
So I stayed, and they have got so in the habit of not minding me that they went on as if I really had been out broiling in the sun.
Mother began to talk very fast about the new house, and getting visiting-cards printed, and taking her place in Society. These ladies coming had given her thoughts a fresh jog. She nearly cried over the bother of it all, and what George would now go expecting of her, and she with no education and no ambition to be a smart woman, as Aunt Gerty was continually egging her on to be, saying it was quite easy if you only had a nice slight figure, like she has.
“Bead chains and pince-nezs won’t do it as you seem to think,” Mother said. “And even if I get to be smart, I shall never get to be happy!”
“Happy!” screamed my Aunt Gertrude. “Who talked of being happy? You don’t go expecting to be happy, unless it makes you happy, as it ought, to put your foot down on those stuck-up cats who have been leading your husband astray all these years, and giving them a good what-for. It would me, that’s all I can say. Happiness indeed! It is something higher than mere happiness. What you have got to do, my dear Lucy, is just to take your call and go on—not before you’ve had a trip to Paris for your clothes, though—and show them all what a pretty woman George Taylor’s despised wife is. There’s an object to live for! That’s your ticket, and you’ve got it. He married you for your looks, now, didn’t he?”
“Nothing else,” said Mother sadly.
“Nonsense! Weren’t you—aren’t you as good as he? You are the daughter of a respectable Irish clergyman. Whose daughter—I mean son—is he? A French tailor’s, I expect. You married him eighteen years ago in Putney Parish Church by special licence, when he was nothing and nobody cared whom or what he married. Little flighty, undersized foreign-looking creature! You have been a good wife to him, borne his children, nursed him when he was ill, and kept a house going for him to come back to when he was tired of the others, and if it’s been done on the sly, it hasn’t been through any will of yours! And now that the matter has been taken out of his hands, and a good thing too, and he’s obliged to leave off his dirty little tricks and own you, and send his grand friends to call on you, and build a nice house to put you in, you want to back out and hide yourself—lose your chance once for all and for ever! You are good-looking, your children are sweet—you’ll soon catch them all up, and then you can be as haughty and stuck-up as the rest of them. If it is me you are thinking of, I shan’t trouble you—I have my work and I mean to stick to it!”
“I shall never disown you, Gerty.”