The Little Vanities of Mrs. Whittaker: A NovelWinter, John Strange
General
The Little Vanities of Mrs. Whittaker: A Novel
Winter, John Strange
Domestic fiction; England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Married women -- Fiction
"I will go in for the higher education," she said to herself. "What do I
know now? I can dance a little, play a little, paint a little. I know no
useful things. My mother sews my clothes and makes my under-linen; my
mother orders the dinner, and never will entrust the making of the
pastry to any hand but her own. What is there left for me? Nothing! I
must go out into the world. There is only one line in which I am likely
to make success, and I am not the class of woman who makes for failure.
I will become a great teacher. To become a great teacher, I must qualify
myself. I must work, and work hard. I must enter at some regular school
of learning, or, failing that, I must find a first-class tutor to work
with me."
Eventually Regina Brown adopted the latter course. As a matter of fact,
she was not sufficiently advanced in any branch of education to enter at
any school of learning which admitted women to its curriculum. To Regina
it mattered little or nothing. For the next ten years she lived in an
atmosphere of hard learning. She proved herself a worker of no mean
ability. She passed all manner of examinations, she took numberless
degrees, and on the day on which she was thirty years old, she found
herself once more gazing at her face in the glass and wondering what she
was going to do with the knowledge that she had so laboriously acquired.
"Regina Brown," she said to herself, "you are no nearer to becoming a
great teacher than you were ten years ago this very day. Will anyone
ever put you in charge of a high school? Will anyone give you a
responsible post in any of the spheres where women can prove that they
are the equals, and more than the equals, of men? It is very doubtful.
You know much, but you have no influence. Ten years ago to-day, Regina
Brown, you told yourself that your mode of existence was a waste of
life. Well, you are wasting your life still. The best thing you can do,
Regina Brown, is to get yourself married."
So Regina Brown got herself married.
Now, to put such an action in those words is not a romantic way of
describing the most--or what should be the most--romantic episode of a
woman's life; but I use Regina's own words, and I say that she got
herself married.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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