am poor, I am
still Lady Anastasia's great-granddaughter. It isn't enough! It's the
most futile sort of existence in the whole world--living up to an old
pedigree when you haven't even got money enough to buy yourself the
right kind of shoes. You sneer at Million for being what you call
nouveau-riche. It isn't half as humiliating and ridiculous as being what
we are--nouveau-pauvre!"

"Beatrice, I think you have gone mad, to say such things."

"Do you? I haven't. I've been thinking them inside me for
months--years," I told her violently. The oval mirror on the opposite
side of the wall from that Gainsborough portrait of Lady Anastasia
showed a queer picture; the picture of a tall, angular, grey-haired and
aristocratic-looking spinster in steel-grey alpaca, coldly facing a
small, rumpled-looking girl (myself) with the tense pose, the bright
flush, and the clenched hands of anger. "And now I can't--I can't stand
this sort of thing any longer----"

"May I ask what you intend to do?"

"To go!" I had only that instant thought of it. But once the words were
out of my mouth I realised that it was the only thing in the world to
do. Hadn't Million said so only this morning when she bade me good-bye?
"You ought to clear out of this house.... You ought to have a fair old
bust-up, Miss Beatrice. And then you ought to bunk!"

Well! "The fair old bust-up" I'd had, or was having. The next thing was
"to bunk"!

Aunt Anastasia regarded me with cold eyes and a still more contemptuous
curl of the lip.

"You will go, Beatrice? But how? To what?"

"To earn my own living----"

"What? There is nothing that you can do."

"I know," I admitted resentfully. "That's another grudge I have against
our family. They never have had to 'come down into the market-place.'
Consequently they wouldn't adapt themselves to the new conditions and
fit themselves for the market now. They'd rather stand aside and
vegetate in a mental backwater on twopence a year, thinking, 'We are
still Lovelaces,' and learning nothing, nothing. Talk about 'The Idle
Rich'! They are not such cucumbers of the ground as 'The Idle Poor'!
I've been trained to nothing. Lots of the girls who live along this road
have taken up typewriting, or County Council cookery, or
teaching--things that will give them independence. I have nothing of the
sort to fall back upon. I might take care of little children, perhaps,
but people like Norland nurses at a hundred a year nowadays. Or I m