the following Wednesday or Thursday. She
found three penny stamps in the bureau at which she wrote and this
served to remind her of her penniless condition. She spent some time
thinking out the possible consequences of that. How after all was she
going to do things, with not a penny in the world to do them with?

Lady Harman was not only instinctively truthful but also almost morbidly
honourable. In other words, she was simple-minded. The idea of a
community of goods between husband and wife had never established itself
in her mind, she took all Sir Isaac's presents in the spirit in which he
gave them, presents she felt they were on trust, and so it was that with
a six-hundred pound pearl necklace, a diamond tiara, bracelets, lockets,
rings, chains and pendants of the most costly kind--there had been a
particularly beautiful bracelet when Millicent was born, a necklace on
account of Florence, a fan painted by Charles Conder for Annette and a
richly splendid set of old Spanish jewellery--yellow sapphires set in
gold--to express Sir Isaac's gratitude for the baby--with all sorts of
purses, bags, boxes, trinkets and garments, with a bedroom and
morning-room rich in admirable loot, and with endless tradespeople
willing to give her credit it didn't for some time occur to her that
there was any possible means of getting pocket-money except by direct
demand from Sir Isaac. She surveyed her balance of two penny stamps and
even about these she felt a certain lack of negotiable facility.

She thought indeed that she might perhaps borrow money, but there again
her paralyzing honesty made her recoil from the prospect of uncertain
repayment. And besides, from whom could she borrow?...

It was on the evening of the second day that a chance remark from
Peters turned her mind to the extensive possibilities of liquidation
that lay close at hand. She was discussing her dinner dress with Peters,
she wanted something very plain and high and unattractive, and Peters,
who disapproved of this tendency and was all for female wiles and
propitiations, fell into an admiration of the pearl necklace. She
thought perhaps by so doing she might induce Lady Harman to wear it, and
if she wore it Sir Isaac might be a little propitiated, and if Sir Isaac
was a little propitiated it would be much more comfortable for Snagsby
and herself and everyone. She was reminded of a story of a lady who sold
one and substituted imitation pearls, no one the wiser, an