The Imaginary Marriage by Henry St. John Cooper
page 22 of 327 (06%)
page 22 of 327 (06%)
![]() | ![]() |
|
Pride had held her back; she had never asked help of any of them. She
thought of the Australian uncle who had invited her to come out to him when she should leave school, and then had for some reason changed his mind and sent her a banknote for a hundred pounds instead. She had felt glad and relieved at the time, but now she regretted his decision. Yet there had been a few friends; she wrote down the names as they occurred to her. There was old General Bartholomew, who had known her father. There was Mrs. Ransome. No, she believed now that she had heard that Mrs. Ransome was dead; perhaps the General too, yet she would risk it. There was Lady Linden, Marjorie Linden's aunt. She knew but little of her, but remembered her as at heart a kindly, though an autocratic dame. She remembered, too, that one of Lady Linden's hobbies had been to establish Working Guilds and Rural Industries, Village Crafts, and suchlike in her village. In connection with some of these there might be work for her. She wrote to all that she could think of, a letter of which she made six facsimile copies. It was not a begging appeal, but a dignified little reminder of her existence. "If you could assist me to obtain any work by which I might live, you would be putting me under a deep debt of gratitude," she wrote. Before she slept that night all six letters were in the post. She wished them good luck one by one as she dropped them into the letter-box, the six sprats that had been flung into the sea of fortune. Would one of them catch for her a mackerel? She wondered. "You'd best take back that notice," Slotman said to her the next |
|