She took her revenge by giving me a remarkably bad character.

I took a hansom back to my rooms. “Take cabs everywhere when you are on my business,” Mr. Holding had said, though he seemed to prefer the ’bus himself. The bothering thing was that everybody was quite right. Mr. Holding had not exaggerated the bad points of Miss Norton’s character or the weakness of his son. But Miss Norton, dishonest money-grubber though she was, was perfectly sincere in her attachment to Charles Holding and was not to be influenced by money in that particular. The position was impossible of solution, and I decided that I had nothing to do but to call on Mr. Wentworth Holding on the following day and tell him so.

I did not find the volume of poems awaiting me, and had not expected to find it, but there was a letter in my letter-box, which began by explaining why it had not arrived. Mr. Charles Holding had wished to have it put into a rather more suitable dress before it was presented to me. His letter went on to say that his meeting with me had been a revelation to him. It had compelled him to break off his engagement. It was not a time to hesitate. Whatever might be the attractions of the woman whom he had once meant to marry, she had not the high ideals, the quixotic spirit, the chivalrous devotion to all that is best which he had found in me. (Naturally, in talking to him I had humoured him a little in what I knew to be his bent. I even saw that I had made some impression on him, but this was too astounding.) The letter went on in rather enraptured terms to speak of the loveliness of my hair and to propose marriage to me.

So the game had, of its own accord, dropped neatly into my hand. I refused Mr. Charles Holding in writing and immediately, and the same post transmitted to his father Charles Holding’s letter to me. The queer thing about the whole business, in the eyes of Mr. Wentworth Holding, was that Miss Sibyl Norton did not bring an action for breach of promise and scornfully refused the extremely handsome solatium which was suggested to her. But this did not surprise me.

I had to show a certain amount of conscience myself, or I should have been made rich and unhappy, for Mr. Wentworth Holding’s gratitude was extreme. Even as it was I was enabled to feel myself out of all danger of such privations as I had recently suffered for the next year or two.

VIII
THE PEGASUS CAR

Extreme poverty and a low diet are not in themselves attractive, but in some ways I was happier in my low-water period than I was now with enough money banked to keep me in moderate comfort for a couple of years. I might be more satisfied with my circumstances, but I now had leisure to become profoundly dissatisfied with myself. I had come to London to play a lone hand and do well by it. I was not going into any of the ruts. I would not become a governess. I had brilliant ideas and enterprise and all the rest of the bag of tricks to make a millionairess of me, yet I had only made few and comparatively small sums by my wits; the rest had been pure luck or—and this seemed more degrading still—had come to me more because of the outside of my head than of the inside. On my arrival in London I did extremely well, merely from the fact that there was a chance resemblance between a girl who was dead and myself. My success in the strange commission that Mr. Wentworth Holding gave me had not been due in the least to my cleverness but to the fact that I was pretty. I had been outwitted by a fraudulent spiritualist and by a romantic lady of title. My attempts at literature had been practically a failure. When I had taken my bright ideas to business men they had either ridiculed me or robbed me. So, on a general review of the case, I did not think as well of myself as I had done. Self-disapproval is not only very unpleasant but it is positively bad for one. It takes away one’s spirit; it checks one’s invention. I determined to make a serious and sober effort to recover my own esteem and incidentally to make a little money.

I looked round for a point from which to start, and after a great deal of consideration I noted as a very useful fact that new motor cars sold for very high prices. A person who could influence the sale of motor cars would be likely to make a good commission. In the old days, after this brief reflection, I should have put on a cheerful smile and my best hat and gone round to one of the big places in Long Acre to explain that I should like to sell cars for them, and the manager of that place, having discovered in twenty seconds that I knew nothing whatever about motor cars, had no influential connection, and was about as likely to sell a motor car as I was to sell the moon, would have shown me out—quite politely, because I happened to be pretty.

So I began in a different way. I went out and bought dark blue linen—many yards of it—and came back and consulted with Minnie Saxe on the manufacture of a garment. Ultimately it was manufactured, and I have seldom seen anyone look more pained and distressed than Minnie Saxe did when I put the abomination on.