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."