would
snap my fingers at all men, and say, "No, I make my life as I choose, and
shall cultivate knowledge and books, and indulge in beautiful ideas of
honor and exalted sentiments, and perhaps one day succumb to a noble
passion." (What grand words the thought, even, is making me write!) But as
it is, if Mr. Carruthers asks me to marry him, as he has been told to do
by his aunt, I shall certainly say yes, and so stay on here, and have a
comfortable home. Until I have had this interview it is hardly worth while
packing anything.

What a mercy black suits me! My skin is ridiculously white. I shall stick
a bunch of violets in my frock--that could not look heartless, I suppose.
But if he asks me if I am sad about Mrs. Carruthers's death, I shall not
be able to tell a lie.

I am sad, of course, because death is a terrible thing, and to die like
that, saying spiteful things to every one, must be horrid--but I can't, I
can't regret her. Not a day ever passed that she did not sting some part
of me; when I was little, it was not only with her tongue--she used to
pinch me, and box my ears until Dr. Garrison said it might make me deaf,
and then she stopped, because she said deaf people were a bore, and she
could not put up with them.

I shall not go on looking back. There are numbers of things that even now
make me raging to remember.

I have only been out for a year. Mrs. Carruthers got an attack of
bronchitis when I was eighteen, just as we were going up to town for the
season, and said she did not feel well enough for the fatigues, and off we
went to Switzerland. And in the autumn we travelled all over the place,
and in the winter she coughed and groaned, and the next season would not
go up until the last court, so I have only had a month of London. The
bronchitis got perfectly well--it was heart-failure that killed her,
brought on by an attack of temper because Thomas broke the Carruthers
vase. I shall not write of her death, or the finding of the will, or the
surprise that I was left nothing but a thousand pounds and a diamond ring.

Now that I am an adventuress, instead of an heiress, of what good to
chronicle all that! Sufficient to say if Mr. Carruthers does not obey his
orders and offer me his hand this afternoon, I shall have to pack my
trunks and depart by Saturday, but where to is yet in the lap of the gods.

He is coming by the 3.20 train, and will be in the house before four, an
ugly, dull time; one can't offer