FAMILY CRITICISM
Sometimes it is a good thing to be aroused out of sleep, especially
if the sleep has been a fool's paradise.
Mrs. Whittaker crept softly out of the room, and went as softly out of
the house. There was a pillar-box a little way along the road, and it
was not an infrequent habit with her to carry her own letters to the
post without troubling to make any sort of outdoor toilette. So on that
soft summer night she gathered up her voluminous skirts, and with the
letter in her hand went down the covered way to the gate and walked as
far as the pillar-box.
"My dear," said a neighbor, who had been to the club and was on his way
home, as he entered the room where his wife was sitting, "I met Mrs.
Whittaker just now. I never saw anything so remarkable."
"Really! She's always rather remarkable in her dress, but how?"
"I don't know, but it was white; it looked like a voluminous exaggerated
nightgown."
"Mrs. Whittaker in a nightgown, Charley? She must have been out of her
mind, or was she walking in her sleep, do you think?"
"Oh, no, I don't think she was; she was evidently going to the post-box,
but her gown--'Pon my word, she looked like a dressed-up figure in a
carnival."
"Oh, she is quite mad," said the little wife; "they say she's very nice,
but quite mad."
Meanwhile, Regina, all unconscious of the strictures which had been
passed upon her appearance, had gone back into Ye Dene, and lingered in
the covered way adjusting a plant here and a leaf there, as if she had
no higher object in life than the arrangement of her house. It happened
that Alfred woke up as his wife gently closed the door behind her.
"I thought Queenie was here. Dear me, it is quite chilly--what a fool I
was to go to sleep here! I suppose it's a sign of old age."
Then he stretched out one arm and then the other one.
"I suppose I ought to write that letter to Jenkinson," was his next
thought. So he heaved himself up out of his comfortable chair, picked up
the art magazine, and sought his own little sanctum, which was behind
the dining-room. There he wrote a letter of three lines making an
appointment for the next morning, and then he too set off for the
pillar-box.
"Hullo! Queenie, are you here?" he exclaimed, as he saw the tall figure
in the voluminous white draperies. "Walk up as far as the post with me."
"Oh, are you going to the post?" she said. "I have just been. Yes, I
will come with you, certainly."
He opened the gate to let her pass out in front of him.
"You won't take cold?" he said anxiously.
"Oh, no, not a night like this."
"I don't know," he remarked, as they sauntered up the pathway together,
"that there is much protection in a frock like this."
"It's not a frock, dear, it's a tea-gown."
"Oh, is it?"
"What the French call _saute de lit_."
"It's flimsy. I don't know that I altogether like it," said Alfred,
slipping his hand under her arm.
"It has the advantage of being cool," said Regina.
"Yes, I daresay it is cool, but this kind of gown makes you look--" He
wobbled his hand about to express something that was not very clear to
either of them.
"I know, it makes me look too fat," said Regina in quite a crushed tone.
"I am _too_ fat."
"Oh, I don't know--you're just comfortable."
"No, Alfred, I'm too fat," Regina reiterated with an air of firm
conviction.
"Well, as to that," said Alfred, slipping the letter into the
letter-box, and wheeling round, still keeping hold of his wife's arm, "I
never did admire the 'two-deal-board' style of woman myself."
Regina immediately decided in her own mind that the hussy was of the
plump little partridge order.
"When I take hold of a lady's arm," continued Alfred, with the facetious
air of a heavy father, "I like an arm that I can feel; I object to
taking hold of a bone. No, no, my dear, you are not at all too fat, but
I don't think you ought to wear gowns, except purely for reasons of
comfort, that tend to increase your apparent size."
"But you don't think it matters much?"
"I'm sure it does not matter very much."
"Alfred, do you think that I am greatly altered?" She asked the question
wistfully, as if the issue of life and death hung upon his reply.
"As a matter of fact," said Alfred Whittaker, promptly, "I think you are
the least altered of any woman I ever knew in my life. I see other women
going to pieces in the most extraordinary manner. Now, Mrs. Chamberlain
came into the office this morning. My goodness, what a wreck! Yellow as
a guinea, her face lined all over--she made me think of a mummy."
"Yet she is younger than I am," said Regina.
"Oh, years--they have nothing to do with the case. You have been a happy
woman, a prosperous woman, a healthy woman; there has been nothing in
your life to seam your face with lines and generally stamp you with all
the worry that is too plainly visible on poor Mrs. Chamberlain's
features. Well, here we are, and here is Julia skipping across the
road."
As the words left his lips a slim young figure in white emerged from the
rustic gate that gave entrance and egress to the house of Marksby. They
stood until Julia came running across the road.
"Have you two dear things been out for an airing?" she exclaimed as she
reached the foot-path.
"No, only to the post-box," said Regina.
"Mother dear," said Julia, "you look exactly as if you were walking
about in your nightgown--a very voluminous and sublimated nightgown, but
a nightgown all the same."
For a moment Regina was too dashed to speak. The thought came fluttering
through her mind, and seemed to fall to the floor of her heart with a
great crash, that surely it was hopeless for her ever to try to win back
Alfred from the hussy by personal means. Evidently she was hopelessly
out of it as regards all questions of dress and the toilette.
"Of course," she hastened to reply, for she did not wish Julia to think
that she was annoyed by her criticism, "it really is a bedroom garment.
I put it on because I was so hot to-day, and in this little country sort
of place I thought going to the post in it would not matter, and--we--we
did not meet anyone, did we, Alfred?"
"It would not have mattered if you had," said Julia; "what you wear is a
matter for your own consideration. But it does look like a nightgown."
"And your mother," said Alfred, "looks better in a sort of glorified
nightgown than most women do in their best frocks. And now don't you
think we had better go off to bed? You will have the least as ever was,
dear?"
Regina's face broke into a smile. "The least as ever was," she replied.
So the two went into the dining-room, where, as usual, the refreshment
tray was set out upon the table. Julia, with a laughing declaration
that she did not want even the least as ever was, went gayly upstairs to
her bedroom.
"I shall be very glad to get away," said Alfred, sitting on the edge of
the oaken dining-table and holding his whisky-and-soda up to the light.
"I want a change badly this year. We are not as young as we were,
Queenie; I've taken a lot out of myself lately."
"You've been so busy."
"Yes, we've never had such a good year in business as the last one, but
there's something wrong with Chamberlain."
"How wrong?"
"I don't know, I can't make it out. Whether there's a screw loose at
home, or whether his wife's health is worrying him, I don't know."
"Does she own to being ill?"
"No, never. This morning I quite offended her by telling her that she
did not look very well."
"And they are not going away till September?"
"No, she has just come back."
"She has been to the sea?"
"Yes."
"Then she came up specially for Maudie's wedding?"
"I suppose so. I did not know she had been away till Chamberlain told me
this morning. He seems dull and gloomy--ah, there's a screw loose there,
but I don't know just where it is. Anyway, I know I want my holiday very
badly this year and glad I shall be when we have packed up and are off
for La Belle France."
"And I," said Regina, with a sigh which, though quickly suppressed, was
full of meaning. Somehow, she could not sleep that night; during the day
some of her most cherished ideals had been ruthlessly torn up by the
roots. Never in all her life before had she had even so much as a
suspicion of her noble Alfred's matrimonial integrity, and she had come
to see flaws in her own life and rents in her own robes. Indeed, had she
not been, as it were, aroused out of sleep, the regeneration of women
had been like to cost her very dear. But, God be thanked! she had been
awakened in time, and in future she would leave the great question of
womanhood to look after itself, and she would devote her time and
thought and the use of her astute brain to regaining her husband's love.
"Think," her thoughts ran, "think--Maudie is married, Julia is young and
beautiful, and fascinating to the opposite sex, you cannot hope to keep
her long in the home nest; think what your life would be living alone
with a husband whose heart was wholly gone from you."