Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman
little. All my life I have been scraping and pinching, pinching and scraping to provide for the happiness and comfort of my husband and son. You will have to do the same. Very few of us have enough for all we should like, and you will find that between husband and wife, when one has to yield, it is the wife who yields. That is the law of the Medes and Persians. Too often it is ‘A suit for him or a frock for me’. . . Promise me that you will never let my boy go short of anything. He has been brought up to a certain standard of comfort, and I know by experience that, if you try to reduce that, it will be you who will suffer in the long run. That is part of the price that we pay for being women. And now,” I said, “let me kiss my daughter.”
I do not wonder that my boy fell in love with her. You will, too, the moment you see her. As Arthur did. . . There is nothing much more to tell you about our dinner with Sir Appleton; when he did allow us to begin, I will say that he tried to make amends for any exhibition of what I had better call the business manner.
Of course, when I reached home, I found that I had only got rid of one trouble to make way for another. Arthur. . . He would have been even more furious if he had been less be-
299
