"I think," said Maudie to Julia, half an hour later, when Evelyn Gage had gone home and the two were getting out their lesson-books for their home work, "I think it would be rather funny to have a mother like an ordinary woman, don't you, Ju?" "Well, I don't know," returned Julia. "Evelyn's mother makes jam and pickles and pastry and lovely little rock cakes, and things that our mother never seems to think of. _She_ is always too much taken up with great questions to bother herself with little etceteras, as old nurse always called such things." "Perhaps, though, we should find it rather a bore to have a mother who worried about our stockings and things, just an ordinary, average kind of mother. But anyway, we haven't got a mother like that, so we must make the best of what we have got." CHAPTER VI REGINA'S VIEWS A Parisian finishing school is for English girls like putting French polish on British oak. Nothing of any importance happened in the household at Ye Dene for two years after this. Then it became time for Maudie to be introduced into society. With most girls this epoch in life is one eagerly looked forward to, tremulously entered upon, and very frequently looked back to with a certain amount of disappointment. Regina herself, I am bound to confess, thought with no small misgiving of the time when she should have to be a wallflower for her daughter's sake. "The child must have her chance like other girls," she remarked to Alfred one night when they were sitting together in the drawing-room at Ye Dene. "She is very beautiful. She will not go empty-handed to her husband. She ought to make a brilliant marriage." "Yes, she is a nice-looking girl," said Alfred Whittaker. "My daughters," said Regina, with an air of dignity which was very pardonable in a mother, "are both beautiful in different styles. Maudie is purely Greek in type; Julia is purely Irish--or I might say French. I noticed when we were in Brittany, two years ago, how thoroughly Irish one type of the peasantry was." "Yes, she's a good-looking girl. They're both all right," said Alfred Whittaker, with the easy indifference of an ordinary father. "I daresay you'll have your hands full a little bit further on, old lady, when we get shoals of young men about Ye Dene, and you have to think out little dances and suppers and theatre parties, and other things of that kind, instead of giving up all your time to making other people happy." "Well, whatever I have to do, I hope I shall do it with all my might," said Regina. "I am sure you will," said Alfred, tenderly; "I am sure you will, Queenie." For his peace of mind's sake, it was just as well that Alfred Whittaker was at business during the greater part of each day, for he might have been upset, not to say scandalized, by the extremely independent, not to say free-and-easy, life which was led by his two daughters.