In the face of the indisputable fact that neither husband nor child approved of the change she had made in her coiffure, Regina entered upon a course of what can only be called complete prevarication. The following day she rose betimes in the morning as was her wont, as one of her fixed habits was always, under all circumstances short of absolute illness, to be ready for breakfast in time to give Alfred a quiet and ample meal. She had from the very beginning conceived it to be her bare duty to be the one to speed him on his daily quest into the city, and to welcome him when he returned to his home in the evening, and to do her full justice, Regina had rarely failed in this particular. She had left her children more or less to shape their own lives, and being of extremely dominant personalities, they had shaped them accordingly--Maudie in the direction of the soft, domestic, luxurious type, which later developes into the "feather bed;" Julia in a keen, alert, downright, make-your-own-world-as-you-go fashion. She had arranged her domestic affairs so that when she took up the regeneration of women her housekeeping arrangements did not suffer by her absence, and as I have said, she was always down in ample time to breakfast, always having made a decently becoming toilette, and she was always or almost always the first person that Alfred saw when he came home again in time for dinner. On this occasion she knew it would be impossible for her to arrange her hair in a new and unaccustomed way with anything like success and at the same time be ready at the usual breakfast time. So she merely combed her hair up and twisted it into a knot on the top of her head. Truth to tell, it was much more becoming than any style she had done it in before, though less elaborate than the arrangement of Madame Florence. She donned a plain white cambric wrapper, touched her face with powder, and tied a broad blue ribbon round her waist, bringing the bow low down, and pinning it with a huge brooch at a point about six inches lower than she usually wore her buckle. In the past one of Regina's landmarks had been what is usually called the Holbein curve, and the mere fact of pinning her waist ribbon a few inches lower than usual was sufficient to transform Regina if not from the ridiculous to the sublime, at least from the grotesque to the prevailing mode. She was already in the spacious and comfortable dining-room reading her letters when Alfred made his appearance. "Whew!" he said, "it's going to be a blazing hot day; the city will be like a grill room!" "And I suppose you are too busy to take an hour or two off?" "Why, do you want me to go anywhere?" "No, I was thinking it would be good for you if you could take an hour or two off and get a little fresh air."