REGINA'S VIEWS
A Parisian finishing school is for English girls like putting
French polish on British oak.
Nothing of any importance happened in the household at Ye Dene for two
years after this. Then it became time for Maudie to be introduced into
society. With most girls this epoch in life is one eagerly looked
forward to, tremulously entered upon, and very frequently looked back to
with a certain amount of disappointment. Regina herself, I am bound to
confess, thought with no small misgiving of the time when she should
have to be a wallflower for her daughter's sake.
"The child must have her chance like other girls," she remarked to
Alfred one night when they were sitting together in the drawing-room at
Ye Dene. "She is very beautiful. She will not go empty-handed to her
husband. She ought to make a brilliant marriage."
"Yes, she is a nice-looking girl," said Alfred Whittaker.
"My daughters," said Regina, with an air of dignity which was very
pardonable in a mother, "are both beautiful in different styles. Maudie
is purely Greek in type; Julia is purely Irish--or I might say French.
I noticed when we were in Brittany, two years ago, how thoroughly Irish
one type of the peasantry was."
"Yes, she's a good-looking girl. They're both all right," said Alfred
Whittaker, with the easy indifference of an ordinary father. "I daresay
you'll have your hands full a little bit further on, old lady, when we
get shoals of young men about Ye Dene, and you have to think out little
dances and suppers and theatre parties, and other things of that kind,
instead of giving up all your time to making other people happy."
"Well, whatever I have to do, I hope I shall do it with all my might,"
said Regina.
"I am sure you will," said Alfred, tenderly; "I am sure you will,
Queenie."
For his peace of mind's sake, it was just as well that Alfred Whittaker
was at business during the greater part of each day, for he might have
been upset, not to say scandalized, by the extremely independent, not to
say free-and-easy, life which was led by his two daughters.
Regina herself was very strong on this point. "I like to hear everything
that my girls tell me," she said, in discussing the question about this
time with the doctor's wife, "but I don't demand it as a right. Nobody
would demand of a boy of nearly eighteen that he should tell his mother
everything that he has said, done and thought during the twenty-four
hours of the day. Why shouldn't a girl be brought up on the same
system?"
"It is not the custom, that's all. I was amenable to my mother," Mrs.
M'Quade replied, "and I expect my daughter to be amenable to me. It is
not a question of want of independence; the child is independent
enough--but a girl's mind and a boy's mind are not the same, they're
different."
"Only because men and foolish mothers have made them so," persisted
Regina.
"Ah, well, you and I agree to differ on those points,--don't we, Mrs.
Whittaker? Heaven forbid that I should make my girl less independent
than I would wish to be myself, but to shut the mother out of her life
is no particular sign of a girl's independence--at least, that is the
way in which I look at it. Then I suppose," went on the doctor's wife,
"that you will, a little later on, allow your girls to have a latchkey?"
"Certainly, if they wish to have a latchkey. Why not?" Mrs. Whittaker
demanded. "I should not expect them to come in at three o'clock in the
morning because I gave them the privilege of a latchkey. If they misused
the privilege, I should take it away from them."
"You are beyond me," the doctor's wife cried. "With regard to my
Georgie, all I can say is, that until she is married she will have to
live just as I lived until I was married; that is to say, she will do
what I tell her, she will wear what I advise her to wear, or what I give
her to wear; she will have a very good time, but she will not have a
separate existence from mine until she goes into a home of her own, or
until I am carried out to my last long resting-place."
"We are good friends," said Regina, with an air of superb tolerance, "we
are good friends, Mrs. M'Quade, and I hope we shall always continue so;
but in some of our ideas we are diametrically opposed to each other, and
we must agree to differ."
But to go back to the question of the entrance of Maud Whittaker into
society, not a little to her parents' surprise, Maud absolutely declined
to do anything of the kind.
"Come out--go into society!" she echoed. "Oh, there will be time enough
for that when Ju is ready."
"Julia? Why, she is two years younger than you," Mrs. Whittaker
exclaimed.
"Yes, dearest, I know it; but I am young for my age and Julia is old for
hers. If she comes out in another year, I can wait until she is ready."
"But why? I never heard of such a thing!"
"I am not very great on society," said Maud. "I would rather wait until
Ju is fully fledged."
"And you will stay at school?"
"Yes, I'd just as soon, only when one comes to think of it, I've learnt
all they can teach me, as far as I know. We are both of us much too big
to be at that school--it's a perfect farce. Why don't you take us away
and give us a course of lessons? That is the proper thing to do--like
they do in Paris. Or why don't you send us to Paris for a year? Then we
may contrive to speak French that is French, and not Park polyglot."
"Maudie!" cried Regina.
"Yes, I know, dearest. You may say 'Maudie!' but facts are facts. The
other day, being, or being supposed to be, the best French speaker in
the school, I was put up to talk to a French lady who was staying at the
Vicarage. You know Mrs. Charlton speaks French like a native--indeed,
I think she has French relations, and I think this was an old
schoolfellow. Anyway, I was put up to talk to her as being the show
girl at French conversation."
"Well?" Regina's tone was as the sniff of a war-horse who scents the
battle from afar.
"I couldn't make head or tail of her," said Maudie. "Ju did--at least,
in a kind of way she did. All the same she had to repeat everything she
said three times over, and then whatever-her-name-was had to make shots
at her meaning."
"But, my dear children," exclaimed Regina, aghast. "I hear you talking
French to each other every day!"
"Yes, I know," said Ju; "but you hear us talking something that isn't
French."
"My education," said Regina, "did not include many modern subjects. That
was one reason why I was so very anxious that you two should learn
French and German."
"Then you had better send us to Paris--because French is just what we
cannot speak. When we want to talk without the servants knowing, we
speak what we call the Park polyglot, but it doesn't go down with French
people. I could see that that friend of Mrs. Charlton's caught a word
here and there, and her native wit supplied the rest."
"Perhaps she was not a person of position, and did not speak good
French," said Regina, who was loath to admit that a child of hers could
do anything badly.
"Oh, not a bit of it! Mrs. Charlton kept calling her Comtesse. She was
all right."
"And how did Miss Drummond come off?"
"Oh, well, Miss Drummond speaks a little honest English-French, which
has no pretense of being the real thing."
It is not surprising that after this, Regina's two girls were withdrawn
from the school at Northampton Park, and were, as she particularly told
everybody, by their own request sent to a school kept by a French lady
on the outskirts of Paris, to be particular in that off-shoot of Paris
which Regina called "Nully."
During the year that followed, Regina worked harder than ever; indeed,
even her complacent husband now and again uttered a mild protest that
his wife should be absolutely absorbed by work which brought him neither
comfort nor emolument.
"I had a wife, once," he said in joke to the doctor, one night when the
M'Quades were dining at Ye Dene; "but now I often think I've only got a
Chairman of Committee."
Nevertheless, he said it with an air of pride, and later, when Regina
asked him seriously whether he would prefer that she should give up her
public duties and once more merge her identity into his, he exclaimed,
"God forbid! What makes you happy, my dear, makes me happy, as long as
you still regard me as the linch-pin of your existence."
"I do, my dear Alfie, I do," she cried. "Indeed I'm the same Queenie
that you married all those years ago. My heart has never altered or
changed in the very least. No other man has ever crossed its threshold
since you first took possession of it."
"As long as you feel that, my dear girl," he returned, putting his arm
about her ample waist and looking at her with fond eyes of loving, if
somewhat sleepy, devotion, "as long as you feel like that, you can do
what work you like and have what interests you like. And good luck go
with you, for I am sure you must be a great comfort to a good many
people."
And Regina did work, like the traditional negro slave. Still, she never
neglected her home duties. Regularly every week she wrote to her girls,
and sometimes when she was dog-tired and found her eyes closing over the
sheet on which she was writing, she shook herself quite fiercely, and
reminded herself of her duty; then blamed herself passionately that her
letters to her girls, her own girls, who thought of her, loved her,
trusted her, made her the recipient of their hopes, doubts and fears,
joys and pleasures, and even such simple sorrows as had as yet entered
into their lives, should ever have come to be a duty--a mere duty.
Poor Regina! I will not pretend that the two girls never wished to
hear from their mother, or that they would not have been bitterly
disappointed had she wholly and totally neglected them; but they were
happy in their school life, and they did not spend their time watching
for the arrival of the _facteur de poste_, as Regina fondly believed of
them. No, they quietly accepted their mother's letters when they
received them, read them, discussed them, and then put them on one side
to think about them no more.
So time went on until the Christmas holidays arrived. The two girls did
not come home to the Park for their vacation, but their father and
mother made a little break in their respective callings and went to
Paris, where the girls joined them at a modest but comfortable
boarding-house.
Now the boarding-house had been recommended by the lady of the school at
which the sisters were being educated. It was one kept by a French lady,
to which but few English people were in the habit of going. Of the
charming language of our neighbors across the Channel, Alfred Whittaker
did not know one word beyond a form of salutation which he called _bong
jour!_ and an equally useful word which he was pleased to call _messy_.
These two old people were therefore absolutely at the mercy of their
young daughters; and the young daughters themselves thanked Heaven many
times, during the three weeks which they passed together in Paris, that
French had not been included in the curriculum of either their father's
or mother's education. Oh, they meant no harm, don't think it for a
moment. There was no harm in either the one or the other. They were
modern, human girls, into whom a life of independence had been instilled
as a religion. Independent their mother wished them to be, and
independent they were to an abnormal and an aggressive degree. They
were as sharp as needles, exactly as their old schoolfellow had said
years before; they had acquired a knowledge of Paris which was simply
extraordinary considering that they had been immured in a _pensionnat_
for demoiselles. They knew all the great emporiums quite intimately, and
having extracted some money from their father on the score that it was
no use their mother coming to Paris without buying clothes, and also
that their own wardrobes required renewing, they whisked their mother
from the _Louvre_, to the _Bon Marche_, from the _Bon Marche_ to the
_Mimosa_, and even got wind of that wonderful old market down in the
Temple, where the Jews hold high revel between the hours of nine o'clock
in the morning and noon.
What a time it was. "My girls," said Regina to an elderly English lady
with whom she foregathered in one of the pretty little white _cremeries_
in the Rue de la Paix, "speak French like natives. I was educated in all
sorts of ways--I have taken degrees and done all sorts of things that
most women don't do--but when you put me down in Paris, I am utterly
undone. I never realized before what a terrible thing want of education
is."
"And yet you have taken degrees," said the lady, admiringly.
"Yes, but they are not much good when you come to Paris. But my
daughters," she added, with pride, "speak French like Parisians."
It was a little wide of the mark. The girls did speak French with
considerable fluency, and they had the advantage of not being shy,
and of never allowing want of knowledge to keep them back from
communicating with their fellow-beings. And as they gabbled on, as
Alfred Whittaker frequently declared, nineteen to the dozen, Regina
stood by and admired.