ight
find a post as a lady's maid----"

"What?"

"Well, you taught me to pack and to mend lace, Auntie! And I can do
hair--it's the only natural gift I've got," I said. "Perhaps I might get
them to give me a chance in some small hairdresser's to begin with."

"You are talking nonsense, and you do not even mean what you say,
child."

"I mean every word of it, and I don't see why it should be nonsense," I
persisted. "It isn't, when these other girls talk of making a career for
themselves somehow. They can get on----"

"They are not ladies."

"It's a deadly handicap being what our family calls a lady," said I.
"I'm going to stop being one and to have something like a life of my own
at last."

"I forbid you," said Aunt Anastasia, in her stoniest voice, "I forbid
you to do anything that is unbefitting my niece, my brother's child, and
Lady Anastasia's great-granddaughter!"

"Auntie, I am past twenty-one," I said quite quietly. "No one can
'forbid' my doing anything that is within the law! And I'm going to take
the rest of my life into my own hands."

CHAPTER VII

MY DEPARTURE

I HAVE been putting on all my outdoor things.

For I feel desperate.

And I must take advantage of this feeling. If I wait until to-morrow,
when my rage and indignation and violent dissatisfaction with
things-as-they-are have died down, and I'm normal again, well, then I
shall get nothing done. I shall think: "Perhaps life here with Aunt
Anastasia at No. 45 Laburnum Grove, isn't so bad after all, even if I do
never have any parties or young friends or pretty frocks or anything
that other happier, less-aristocratically connected girls look upon as a
matter of course. Anyhow, there's nothing for it but to go on in the
same humdrum fashion that I've been doing----"

Ah, no! I mustn't let myself go back to thinking like that again.

The secret of success is to get something done while you're in the mood
for it!

* * * * *

In our hall with the unmended umbrella stand and the trophy of Afghan
knives I was stopped by Aunt Anastasia.

"At least I insist upon knowing," she said, "where you are going now?"

I said, quite gently and amiably: "I am going to see Million."

"Million? The little object who was the servant here? Your taste in
associates becomes more and more deplorable, Beatrice. You should not
forget that even if she has