I wonder so much if it is amusing to be an adventuress, because that is
evidently what I shall become now. I read in a book all about it; it is
being nice looking and having nothing to live on, and getting a pleasant
time out of life--and I intend to do that! I have certainly nothing to
live on, for one cannot count £300 a year; and I am extremely pretty, and
I know it quite well, and how to do my hair, and put on my hats, and those
things--so, of course, I am an adventuress! I was not intended for this
rôle--in fact, Mrs. Carruthers adopted me on purpose to leave me her
fortune, as at that time she had quarrelled with her heir, who was bound
to get the place. Then she was so inconsequent as not to make a proper
will--thus it is that this creature gets everything, and I nothing!

I am twenty, and up to the week before last, when Mrs. Carruthers got ill
and died in one day, I had had a fairly decent time at odd moments when
she was in a good temper.

There is no use pretending even when people are dead, if one is writing
down one's real thoughts. I detested Mrs. Carruthers most of the time. A
person whom it was impossible to please. She had no idea of justice, or of
anything but her own comfort, and what amount of pleasure other people
could contribute to her day.

How she came to do anything for me at all was because she had been in love
with papa, and when he married poor mamma--a person of no family--and then
died, she offered to take me, and bring me up, just to spite mamma, she
has often told me. As I was only four I had no say in the matter, and if
mamma liked to give me up that was her affair. Mamma's father was a lord,
and her mother I don't know who, and they had not worried to get married,
so that is how it is poor mamma came to have no relations. After papa was