ld try for a job at a
photographer's--you're just the girl for a dark-room."

Really, that's all I said--just affectionate, lambent, helpful
criticism, with a little Tarragon in it. Yet next day when I met her on
the staircase she said she didn't want to talk to me any more. So I
heaved her over the balustrade and she had a forty-foot drop on to the
marble below. I am too impulsive--I have always said so. Rather a
pathetic touch was that she died just as the ambulance reached the
hospital. I have lost quite a lot of nice friends in this way.

With the exception of a few teeny-weeny murders, I do not think I have
done anything in my life that I regret. And even the murders--such as
they were--were more the fault of my circumstances than of myself. If,
as I have always wished, I had lived alone on a desert island, I should
never have killed anybody at all. But when you go into the great world
(basement entrance) and have a bad night, or the flies are troublesome,
you do get a feeling of passionate economy; you realize that there are
people you can do without, and you do without them. This is the whole
truth about a little failing of which my detractors have made the most.
Calumny and exaggeration have been carried to such an extent that more
than once I have been accused of being habitually irritable.

My revered model wrote that she had always been a collector "of letters,
old photographs of the family, famous people and odds and ends." I have
not gone quite as far as this.

I have collected odds, and almost every autumn I roam over the moors and
fill a large basket with them, but I have never collected ends.

I do want to collect famous people, but for want of a little education I
have not been able to do it. I simply do not know whether it is best to
keep them in spirits of wine, or to have them stuffed in glass
cases--like the canaries and the fish that you could not otherwise
believe in. I have been told that really the best way is to press them
between the leaves of some very heavy book, such as an autobiography,
but I fancy they lose much of their natural brilliance when treated in
this way.

Another difficulty is that the ordinary cyanide bottles that you buy at
the naturalist's, though excellent for moths, are not really large
enough to hold a full-sized celebrity. At the risk of being called a
sentimentalist, I may say that I do not think I could kill famous people
by any method that was not both quick and