John Strange Winter

Many people look upon mental blindness as they do upon physical blindness—as a terrible affliction. Yet, when the mentally blind suddenly see, their condition is not usually improved thereby.

If the Whittaker girls had been unpopular as children, they certainly made up for it, so far as Northampton Park was concerned, when they became young women. The innovation of having an At Home day of their own, at which their mother made a point of not appearing, was so daring that every girl in the Park made it her duty to be present thereat, and when it was bruited abroad that it was really a girl’s At Home, with no overshadowing mothers and such like sober persons, that the girls had their own room and their own tea-things, and excellent provision in the way of cakes, and that cigarettes were allowed after six o’clock, then not only the girls, but also their brothers, soon came flocking into Ye Dene in considerable numbers. The whole winter did this state of things continue, until the At Home days at Ye Dene were no longer a nine days’ wonder but an established fact.

Then Maudie and Julia began to meet with other girls further afield than their own immediate vicinity, girls who were connections or friends of the girls who lived in the Park, and invitations began to shower in upon Regina’s daughters. They were perfectly independent—Regina wished them to be so, and prided herself on the fact that they were so—and as their comings and goings did not interfere with the comfort of their father, Alfred Whittaker saw nothing to which he could frame any reasonable objection in his daughters’ mode of life.

It happened one afternoon that the two girls were having tea and muffins in their own sitting-room. It was just before Easter, that week when the tide of suburban entertaining lulls a little, and the two were sitting by a blazing fire in big wicker chairs drawn close up to the fender, the low Moorish tea-table conveniently placed between them.

“Maudie,” said Julia, suddenly, “I think we shall have to pull up.”

“Pull up! why?” Maudie’s tone was blank, for she herself had a particular reason for not wanting to pull up in any shape or form just then.

“We’re getting too cheap,” said Julia.

“Cheap! and we’ve spent nearly all our dress allowance!” Maudie exclaimed.

“I don’t mean cheap in that way. No, we’re getting cheap socially. Anybody thinks they can come to our days and bring anyone they like, and we do half the entertaining of the Park for people who do nothing for us.”

“It makes us popular,” said Maudie, helping herself to another piece of muffin.

“Yes, yes, but is such popularity worth it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are we going on right through the season?”

“Well, you know, Ju, the season doesn’t make much difference to us.”

“It’s going to,” said Julia.

“Is it going to this season?” Maudie demanded. “That’s the question—is it going to this season?”

“I don’t see why not. We’ve got any amount of invitations for next month, and not more than a third of them are in the Park. A third? A quarter, I should say. Now I’ll tell you what I propose doing.”

“Well?”

“I propose, as it is the regulation thing to do, to chuck our ‘day’ until next autumn.”

“Julia!” Maudie was so taken back that she was surprised into giving her sister her full name, the diminutive thereof not seeming to express sufficiently what was in her mind.

“You may say ‘Julia,’ but my head is screwed on the right way. I suppose I shall never get mother and the dad to move away from Ye Dene.”

“From the Park?”

“Yes. We have got too much of the Park about us. It’s all Park. Dad is very well off, mother has money of her own—why shouldn’t we go and live in Kensington? We could shunt all these Park people, excepting just the best—those we have been the most intimate with—and get into a real good set. What’s the use of having a well-off father and a very distinguished mother if we hide our light under a bushel in such a place as this?”

“The people that live here are just as good as we are.”

“Well, perhaps they are, and perhaps they’re not, Maudie,” Julia retorted sharply. “If we satisfy them, I’m quite sure they don’t satisfy me. I don’t believe myself in sitting on the bottom rung of the ladder when you can easily and comfortably climb up to the top.”

“But shall we ever get to the top?”

“No, never; that means strawberry leaves. But there are a dozen reasons for getting out of Ye Dene. In the first place, the dad has to get up at an ungodly hour in the morning so as to get to his office at the usual time. Mother spends half her life in the train, and you know neither of them are as young as they were. I went up to town with mother yesterday, and I’m sure it was pitiful to see her dragging herself up those steep station stairs. She ought to be able to get into a cab and go to her meetings, a woman of her substance.”

“Perhaps. But we shall never get a house like this—never, never, Ju. We shall have to do without our own sitting-room, or else have a little box somewhere at the back of the house, looking into a yard. We shall have to have clean curtains every fortnight like the Brookeses. We shall have to sleep up on the third or fourth story—and it will all be horrid, horrid, horrid!”

“Not at all. My dear, there are plenty of houses quite as good as this in Kensington.”

“They’ll be three times the rent.”

“Not a bit of it, not the least bit of it. Look at that house where the Ponsonby-Piggots live; garden—charming garden, tea-house at the end, greenhouse, shrubs, lawn, three lovely sitting-rooms on the entrance floor, and only two stories above. We don’t want a castle with eight or nine bedrooms—what should we do with them? Why, the Ponsonby-Piggots keep fowls!”

“Oh, well, I suppose you’ll have your own way. You had better talk to mother about it.”

“I’ve learned a lot from the Ponsonby-Piggots,” Julia went on. “They don’t just trust to tea and cakes and cigarettes, and a song or two, to make them somebody. Each of those three plain girls—and that’s rather paying them a compliment—has got some special line of her own. Gwenny is engaged to the ugliest man in London, and she makes a parade of having his presentment everywhere—statuettes, photographs, pastels, miniatures, everything you can think of—to bring the man into prominence. And he hasn’t got twopence; and though he’s a gentleman, they probably won’t be able to marry for the next ten years. Theo collects Napoleon relics. Didn’t you notice that the end of their sitting-room is devoted to Napoleon?”

“Yes, I did, but I didn’t know why,” said Maudie in rather a wondering tone.

“Well, that’s why. And Stella, the little one with the curley red hair, she collects half-a-dozen things—postcards, autographs, souvenir teaspoons, and old lustre ware. These girls only have an allowance of forty pounds a year for their dresses—each, I mean,” she added hurriedly. “And if they want more they make it.”

“But how?”

“Oh, in various ways. Gwenny, I believe, is secretary to a big doctor up in town. She only has to attend from ten till five, and she gets a rousing good salary, and she’s putting it all away towards house furnishing. Then Theo, she does a bit of journalism, and Stella, well, she’s the most original of all. She’s a regular little Jew.”

“How do you mean—regular little Jew?”

“Oh, she’s always chopping and changing among her collections. She made a hundred and twenty pounds last year in selling things at a thoroughly good profit that she had picked up for nothing. If her mother would let her, she’d go into a flat with Theo and open a regular business. But Mrs. Ponsonby-Piggot says that the girls have plenty of money for their needs, and always will have.”

“Well, if so, why should they? You wouldn’t like to open a shop?”

“I’d do anything rather than stick in the mud,” said Julia, “anything in the wide world.”

“Stick in the mud!” echoed Maudie. “And this is all that has come of mother’s higher education!”

“Well, mother higher-educated herself. She made a huge mistake, and nobody knows it better than mother. She is up in all sorts of learned and abstruse subjects that she has never been able to turn to account in any shape or form, and the ordinary things that women ought to know she is perfectly ignorant of. Fancy setting mother to make a pie!”

“Fancy setting you to make a pie,” retorted Maudie.

“Oh, well, I’ve been thinking it wouldn’t be half a bad idea if we were to enter at the Park Polytechnic and take a course of dressmaking, another of millinery, another of cooking, and, for the matter of that, we might take a fourth at housekeeping.”

“How should we get it all in?”

“Oh, well, that’s easy enough. You pay two guineas a year, and you can join any class you like. The classes are going on all day long, so Rita Mackenzie tells me, and you pay sixpence each as a sort of entrance fee.”

“Then we couldn’t do that if we left Ye Dene.”

“Ah, but we sha’n’t leave Ye Dene to-day, nor to-morrow—I never thought of that for a moment. But if we once graft into the dad’s head that it is possible we may one day want to leave Ye Dene, he’ll put himself in the right channel for getting good offers for it. Don’t make any mistake about the value of Ye Dene. It’s freehold, it is in the main road, and it is in the best position in the main road. It’s in perfect repair inside and out. I don’t believe, if the dad was to put it in the hands of two or three good agents, that we should be here two months.”

“What is Rita Mackenzie going in for?”

“House decoration. My dear, I went in to see her yesterday—I forgot to tell you; it was when you were over at the Marksbys’. You know there’s a studio to their house?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Well, her father has made it over to her. She took a course of lessons, and she’s decorated it herself. It’s a dream!” said Julia. “When I look round this room and think of Rita’s, it makes me feel sick.”

“What’s the matter with this room?”

“Oh, what’s the matter! Just this, Maudie, that since we evolved this room out of our own ignorant, vulgar minds, I’ve been getting educated.”

“My dear, I thought we had finished our education long ago,” said Maudie, somewhat taken aback.

“That’s where your limitations come in, Maudie. If ever you get married, you’ll find that you have everything to learn that will make life happy and comfortable to you, unless you enter yourself at the Polytechnic beforehand.”

“I might do worse,” said Maudie, looking round. She honestly couldn’t see, poor, prosaic girl that she was, that anything was amiss with their own especial sanctum. It was bright, cheerful, dainty, and scrupulously clean. There were evidences on all sides that it was a room in which people lived a great share of their lives. A great Persian cat lay on a blue velvet cushion on one side of the hearth, and a very presentable black spaniel was curled up in a padded basket on the other. “I’m sure,” she said, looking into the blazing depths of the fire, and then helping herself to another piece of muffin, “I’m sure there’s not a prettier room in the Park than ours.”

“Oh, my dear, don’t talk nonsense! It’s horrid. We’ve got a Louis Quinze paper, Louis Quinze chintz, and make-believe Japanese bead and reed curtains. We’ve got cheap bazaar rubbish all over the place, and not one scrap of furniture worth calling furniture in it. The carpet gets up and hits the walls, and the walls in their turn slap the screen, and the screen clashes with the chintz, and you and I clash with everything else. Oh, it’s dreadful, it’s horrible!”

“We’ve spent most of our dress allowance on it,” wailed Maudie.

“That’s the piano. You know, Maudie, you would have a good one. And by-the-bye,” she added, letting her remark fly into the air like a bombshell, “and by-the-bye, if either of us gets married before the piano is paid for, will the other poor wretch have to finish off the payments by herself?”

“Well, even if she does,” said Maudie, “the one that has to finish off the payments will have the piano.”