“I like you, Rosamund Lindley,” Cousin Geoffrey had said in his letter; “you are no beggar, and no fawner. You are a simple-minded, honest, downright English girl. You have courage, too, and I always respect courage. You have come to me to help you with your art. You have done this with such a ludicrous, belief in yourself and your own powers, with such a simple sort of vanity, that I should probably have tried to cure it by granting your request had you come to me as a stranger. But I cannot look upon you as a stranger, Rosamund; you belong to my own kith and kin, and you are the daughter of the woman I love best on earth. Because you are Mary Rutherford’s daughter I give you half my wealth if you fulfil the conditions I require!”
I knew these words of the long letter almost by heart; I said them over to myself many times.
When the first light of morning dawned I rose from my chair, stretched my cramped limbs, pinched my arms to see if I were awake or if I had only been going through a horrid nightmare; opened the window, took in a draught of the cool morning air, and putting Cousin Geoffrey’s letter into my pocket went down-stairs.
The place looked as I had left it last night—our maid-of-all-work had not yet come down-stairs. Ugly Poverty surrounded me, and once more it hemmed me tightly around, and made its presence more felt even than of old, I had looked into a land of promise—an ideal and lovely country. I had thought to enter; but alas! iron bars of pride, of maidenly modesty, of right feeling, of even righteousness, kept me out. All the womanhood within me declared wildly and desperately—
“Even to enter into that promised land you shall not sell yourself?”
Ugly Poverty and I must still be close acquaintances—nay more, we must be intimate friends, even comrades, walking the path of life side by side and hand in hand.