So her thoughts ran pleasantly on. Yes, it was indeed sweet to be so blessed as she was in her home life. She had once believed that her life was a wasted one. Well, that was in the foolish days, before she had tried her wings. Not that she ever regarded her flights into the world of higher thought with the very smallest regret; that could never be. Enlightenment is always enlightenment, whether it is actually paying in a monetary sense or not. She firmly believed that an elaborate and somewhat masculine education had enabled her to become a better wife and mother than she would have been had she been contented with the genteel education which her parents had thought good enough, further than which indeed their minds had never attempted to fly. Perhaps, her thoughts ran, her mission in life was to bring enlightenment to the minds of other women, in a somewhat different way to that which she had hitherto accepted as the most reasonable. Be that as it may, Regina entered upon her duties as President of the S.R.W., armed with the full sanction of her husband's permission and approval. To all her friends she was an amazing and, at the same time, an amusing study about this epoch. "I am perfectly certain," remarked Mrs. M'Quade to the mother of the little girl who at school was called Tuppenny, "I am perfectly certain that Mrs. Whittaker has at last found her _metier_. Are you going to join her scheme for the regeneration of women?" "I don't think so," replied the lady who lived at Highthorn. "My husband is so very sneering when anything of the kind is mentioned. I shouldn't mind for myself; I think it would be rather fun. They are going to have tea-parties and _soirées_, and all sorts of amusements. But George would be so full of his fun, that I don't feel somehow it would be good enough for me to go into. Besides, it's three guineas a year. As far as I can tell," she continued, "from what Mrs. Whittaker has told me, there won't be any real regeneration of women in our day. It may come in the day of our grandchildren, but I don't feel inclined to work for that." "That shows a great want of public spirit," remarked the doctor's wife, laughingly. "Yes, I daresay it does, but I don't believe women are public-spirited, except here and there--generally when they have made a failure of their own lives, as my old man always says." "But Mrs. Whittaker hasn't made a failure of her life." "Well, she has and she hasn't. She has failed to become anything very much out of the ordinary. She is very fond of calling herself an unconventional woman who never does anything like anybody else, but I fail to see very much in it excepting that she makes horrible guys of her girls."