John Strange Winter

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 rÉgime, 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 rÉgime 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?’”