I've surmounted all objections; the chief being Million—I mean "Miss Million"—herself. Her I have practically bullied into letting her ex-mistress come and work for her. After much talk and many protests, I said, finally, "Million, you've got to."

And Million finally said: "Very well, Miss Beatrice, if you will 'ave it so, 'ave it so you will. It don't seem right to me, but——"

Then there was my Aunt Anastasia, the controller of my destiny up to now. Her I wrote to from that hostelry in Kensington, which was Million's first "move" from No. 45, the Putney villa. And from Aunt Anastasia I received a letter of many sheets in length.

Here are a few of the more plum-like extracts:

"When I received the communication of your insane plan, Beatrice, I was forced to retire to the privacy of my own apartment"—

(Not so very "private," when the walls are so thin that she can hear the girls in the adjoining room at [Pg 54] No. 46 rustling the tissue-paper of the box under the bed that they keep their nicest hats in!)

[Pg 54]

"and to take no fewer than five aspirins before I was able to review the situation with any measure of calm."

Then—

"It is well that my poor brother, your father, is not here to see to what depths his only child has descended, and to what a milieu!"

(The "descent" being from that potty little row of packing-cases in Putney to the Hotel Cecil, where I am engaging a suite of rooms for Miss Million and her maid to-morrow!)

"Your dear great-grandmother, Lady Anastasia, would turn in her grave, did she ever dream that a Miss Lovelace, a descendant of the Lovelaces of Lovelace Court," etc., etc.

(But I am not a Lovelace now. I have told Million—I mean, I have requested my new employer—to call me "Smith." Nice, good, old, useful-sounding sort of name. And more appropriate to my present station!)

Then my aunt writes:

"Your fondness for associating with young men of the bounder class over garden walls and on doorsteps was already a sufficiently severe shock to me. As that particular young man appears to be still about here, poisoning the air of the garden 

 Prev. P 40/271 next