ONSTANCE LADY WHITTLEMERE lives in a huge, gloomy house in the very center of Mayfair, has a majestic appearance, and is perfectly ready for the day of judgment to come whenever it likes. From the time when she learned French in the school-room—she talks it with a certain sonorous air, as if she were preaching a sermon in a cathedral—and played Diabelli's celebrated duet in D with the same gifted instructress, she has always done her duty in every state of life. If she sat down to think, she could not hit upon any point in which she has not invariably behaved like a Christian and a lady, particularly a lady. Yet she is not exactly pharisaical; she never enumerates even in her own mind her manifold excellencies, simply because they are so much a matter of course with her. And that is precisely why she is so perfectly hopeless. She expects it of herself to do her duty and behave as a lady should behave, and she never has the smallest misgiving as to her complete success in living up to this ideal. That being so, she does not give it another thought, knowing quite well that whoever else may do doubtful or disagreeable things, Constance Whittlemere will move undeviatingly on in her flawless courses, just as the moon, without any diminution of her light and serenity, looks down on slums or battle-fields, strewn with the corpses of the morally or physically slain. And Lady Whittlemere, like the moon, does not even think of saying. "Poor things!" She is much too lunar.
At the age of twenty-two (to trace her distressing history) her mother informed her, at the close of her fourth irreproachable London season, that she was going to marry Lord Whittlemere. She was very glad to hear it, for he was completely congenial to her, though even if she had been very sorry to hear it, her sense of duty would probably have led her to do as she was told. But having committed that final act of filial obedience, she realized that she had a duty to perform to herself in the person of the new Lady Whittlemere. and climbed up on a lofty foursquare pedestal of her own. Her duty toward herself was as imperative as her duty toward Miss Green had been, when she learned the Diabelli duet in D, and was no doubt derived from the sense of position that she, as her husband's wife, enjoyed. Yet perhaps she hardly "enjoyed" it, for it was not in her nature to enjoy anything. She had a perfectly clear idea, as always, of what her own sense of fitness entailed on her, and she did it rigidly. "The thing," in fact, was her rule in life. Just as it was the thing to obey her governess and obey her mother, so, when she blossomed out into wifehood, the thing was to be a perfect and complete Lady Whittlemere. Success, as always, attended her conscientious realization of this. Luckily,—or unluckily, since her hope of salvation was thereby utterly forfeited,—she had married a husband whose general attitude toward life, whose sense of duty and hidebound instincts, equaled her own, and they lived together after that literal solemnization of holy matrimony in St. Peter's Eaton Square for thirty-four years in unbroken harmony. Both had an unswelled sense of their own dignity, never disagreed on any topic under the sun, and saw grow up round them a copious family of plain solid sons and comely daughters, none of whom caused the parents a single moment's salutary anxiety. The three daughters, amply dowered, married into stiff mahogany families at an early age, and the sons continued to prop up the conservative interests of the nation by becoming severally a soldier, a clergyman, a member of Parliament, a diplomatist, and they took into all these liberal walks of life the traditions and proprieties of genuine Whittlemeres. They were all honorables and all honorable and all dull and all completely aware of who they were. Nothing could been nicer.