live as they please. If I had ten thousand a year, or even five, I 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,