ROUND EVERYWHERE
Young eyes see so clearly that we must often be very thankful that
young people do not have the deciding voice in our lives.
Regina duly received the promised card or diet sheet. I may say that she
took it from its enveloping wrapper with a certain feeling of mystery
akin to awe, and she studied its items carefully. Its directions were
many and explicit; it not only gave the foods which she might eat, but
also the foods which she might not eat, the drinks she might take and
the drinks she might not take, and it gave the weights of each portion
and the number of each special biscuit. Acting according to the
instructions from the specialist, Regina had ordered a sufficient
quantity of the specially prepared diet biscuits which were part of the
_regime_, and it occurred to her, when the parcel arrived a little later
than the diet sheet reached her, that she would have to account to her
husband and family for the startling change in her diet. Now, Regina was
perfectly sure of one thing: that she would be most unwise to tell
Alfred the exact nature of the _regime_ on which she was about to start.
She felt that a wife who was taking elaborate means, and undergoing
great self-sacrifice, putting herself into prison, so to speak, for the
sole and express purpose of thinning herself down, would show to great
disadvantage beside a person of the plump order who was probably twenty
years her junior, and able to peck greedily at the most fattening kinds
of food. So Regina entered upon a course of what I may call harmless
prevarication.
"I have something to tell you, dear Alfred," she said that evening when
he had well dined and had not noticed that she had passed about half the
items of dinner; "I want to have a little talk with you."
"Yes, my dear girl, about having a celebration of the home-coming? Oh
yes, you would wish it, and, of course it was arranged before the
wedding."
"No, it is about myself."
"Yourself, dearest? And what about yourself?"
"Alfred, I have not been feeling myself lately."
"Why--how--what d'you mean? You're not ill, are you?"
"Well, not exactly ill; I can't truthfully say that; yet I've not been
myself, I've not felt myself, I've not looked myself--"
"No, I've noticed how very much paler you have grown; you seem to have
lost your nice fresh color."
She _had_ lost her nice fresh color; it had disappeared with the advent
of the powder box, and Alfred had not, to use a very slang phrase,
dropped down to the fact.
"Well, I don't believe in leaving these things to mend themselves,"
Regina went on, busily pleating and unpleating the deep black lace which
adorned the sleeves of her handsome tea-gown, "it's better to stop
anything of that sort at the outset."
"Well, you've been to a doctor?"
"Yes, I've been strongly advised to go to Dr. Money-Berry in Harley
Street. You see, I've got so very stout lately, Alfred, and he thinks my
having gained in weight has put me all wrong. My heart is very
feeble--compared with what it used to be."
"My--_dear_! Ough! Tut, tut, tut--think of our going on and living our
ordinary life and all the time you are suffering--it's dreadful to think
of."
"Well, not exactly suffering; I'm not quite an invalid. Dr. Money-Berry
advised me to live very carefully during the next few months; he thinks
I shall be all right if I leave off starchy foods--they are so bad for
the valves of the heart and--and I don't want to leave you, Alfred," she
said in a pathetic little voice.
"Good heavens! Go away and leave me! What are you talking of, Queenie?
If you were to go away and leave me--for another man--I should blow my
brains out," and here he began to walk about the room. "And if I didn't,
I should go to the devil."
I am ashamed to record that there arose in Regina's mind a picture of
Alfred, her noble Alfred! going headlong to the devil with a hussy of
plump proportions.
Alfred continued excitedly, "And if you were to leave me in the other
sense--I don't know what I should do."
"Dear Alfred, you would probably marry again," she observed quietly.
"Never--never! Put that thought out of your mind once and for all. I
should live out the rest of my life as best I could--but I really can't
talk about it. You were perfectly right to go to a specialist, and you
must follow out his treatment to the very letter. Now, promise me you
will do everything he tells you, take all the medicine he gives you, and
live by line and rule until he tells you that you are really out of
danger."
The heart of Regina was sick within her. She knew she was deceiving
Alfred; she felt herself to be the basest and blackest and most
ungrateful woman that had ever been born into the world, and yet, she
told herself, her deception was a harmless one, that if she was sinning
against him, she was sinning to a good end. And so Regina entered upon
her course of penal servitude, for I can call it nothing more or less.
The same explanation which was given to Alfred was given to Julia, and
henceforth Regina, although she ate at the same table, ate alone. She
did not in any way attempt to curtail the meals of her husband and
child, but supplied the table in exactly the usual manner.
"Why do you buy salmon when you can't touch it yourself?" Alfred asked
over and over again.
"Because you work hard and want your meals. If you had the same
necessity for living as I do, I should keep you up to it."
"I don't believe you would buy salmon for yourself," said Alfred, almost
vexedly; "it must be a temptation to you, so fond of it as you are."
"Oh, no, because I have an object in view. Believe me, I often have
sweetbreads for lunch."
"But you do not fling them in my face at dinner; that is quite another
matter."
So the martyrdom went on, and Regina's figure became smaller by degrees
and beautifully less. When she had been dieting for about two months she
had lost a couple of stones in weight. She had a couple of smart gowns
from Madame d'Estelle in which she had allowed that adroit lady free
play for her taste and imagination. The result was that she gradually
presented to the eyes of her family a subdued and refined Regina, much
more attractive to the outer world, but not the Regina to whom the
inhabitants of Ye Dene had been accustomed.
It was about two months from the beginning of Regina's martyrdom that
Alfred Whittaker began to be aware that his wife was losing flesh. "My
dear," he said one morning, as he sat opposite his wife at the
breakfast-table, "I'm not quite satisfied with that doctor of yours."
"Why not, dear?"
"Why, I don't think he's doing well by you."
"But I am so much better."
"You don't look it; you're half the size you were."
"Oh, no, Alfred! There's still plenty of me."
"You are much smaller, and since you have taken to wearing black and
indefinable gray gowns, you seem to be wasting away to nothing. When is
it going to stop?"
"When he is satisfied that I am just the right weight. I am much
stronger, Alfred; I can walk miles!"
"Can you? Well, I don't know that it is necessary for you to walk miles;
you can afford to take a cab whenever you want one."
"Yes, dear, but I am much better."
"I know you say so, and you've been awfully plucky about your diet and
so on, but when is it going to end? I don't want a wife like a thread
paper."
Julia had come into the room while he was speaking. "Dear daddy," she
said, "you're very dense. Mother's getting vain in her old age. She's
got a French milliner, she's got a French dressmaker, she does her hair
a new way, and she's getting her figure back again. She's quite a new
woman, she's given up working for womanhood generally, and she's getting
frivolous. She's got a club--I mean a real club--in the West End, and
one of these days she's going to give a dinner party and ask you and me
to it."
"Well, well, well, if you're quite sure you are not doing anything
foolish," said Alfred Whittaker; "I only want you to be happy in your
own way. But I want you to be _quite_ sure that you are not doing
anything foolish. It's not natural for a woman of your age to be starved
down to skin and bone."
"My dear Alfred! Think of the breakfast I have made this morning; I have
had twice as much as you."
"I rather doubt that," said Alfred, patting himself in the region he had
just filled, "I rather doubt that. But I should be more satisfied if
you went to a heart specialist. Who is Dr. Money-Berry? What's his
line?"
"He is a specialist," said Regina, with an air, "on all matters
connected with the internal organs above the belt, and those bound in
the chains of fatty degeneration of the heart, he sets free. To those
whose food does not digest properly, he seems able to give a new
digestion. I have full faith in his integrity and his skill, and I beg,
dear Alfred, that you will not worry yourself. I am quite a new woman,
regenerated, rejuvenated."
"Yes, I know, but you are getting so thin."
"And don't you like me better thinner?"
"No, I couldn't like you better, that's impossible, but if you are
better in health for being thinner it's all very well. But if you are
going on reducing yourself to a miserable skeleton nothing will make me
believe it is good for you or make me declare I admire you, for I never
shall."
After he had gone she sat with a flushed and uneasy expression on her
smooth face. As the gate clicked behind her father's departing form
Julia burst into laughter.
"Lor', mother," she said, "how can you bamboozle poor daddy as you do?"
"Julia!"
"Yes, I mean it. Poor daddy doesn't see one inch before his nose, and
you are a sensible woman. You let him think that Dr. Money-Berry is a
specialist for fat round the heart."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, Dr. Money-Berry is a specialist for fat round everywhere, whom
fashionable women go to to have their figures made sylph-like. If Dr.
Money-Berry depended upon cases of heart trouble he wouldn't hang out
very long in Harley Street, and nobody knows that better than you,
mother."
"Julia!"
"But," Julia continued, "you've changed immensely during the last few
months. I don't know what made you throw up your societies and try to
make yourself into a mere domestic woman; but you have regenerated
yourself, that's true enough."
"I was too fat, Julia; it was not wholesome."
"You were not more fat than you had been for the last ten years. I never
remember you so thin as you are now. You have changed your milliner, you
have changed your dressmaker, you do your hair a new way--you are a
totally different woman, and I think daddy is quite right when he asks,
'Where is it going to end?'"