"Friends! Is that why you make your own in this hole-and-corner fashion?"
"I shouldn't be to blame if I did!" I declared hotly. "You don't realise what my life is here with you. It's all very well for you to live in the past, pondering over the dear departed glories of our family. But at my age one doesn't care twopence for an illustrious past. What one wants is something to do, and to be—and to enjoy—in the present! I don't see why it should be enough for me to remember that, even if I 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——"