“It’s damnable!” he said.
“It is,” I replied.
“And it isn’t as if the little ass couldn’t afford it!” he broke out, after a moment. “She can’t have less than thirty thousand a year, and she lives on one. And it will all come to you when she dies. And it’s rolling up, and rolling up, and the years pass and pass. Our case is desperate. Janet, can’t you say something to her? Can’t you make a great appeal to her? Can’t you get hold of someone who has an influence over her, and appeal to them?”
I did not think it necessary to answer. He knew I had tried everything years ago.
It had been thought a wonderful thing for me when Aunt Pussy, my godmother, adopted me when I was fourteen. We were a large family, and I was the only delicate one, not fitted, so my parents thought, to “fend for myself” in this rough world. And I had always liked Aunt Pussy, and she me. And she promised my father, on his impecunious death-bed, that she would take charge of me and educate me. She further gratuitously and solemnly promised that she would leave me all her money. Her all was not much, a few hundreds a year. But that was a great deal to people like ourselves. She was our one rich relation, and it was felt that I was provided for, which eventually caused an estrangement between me and my brothers and sisters, who had to work for their living; while I always had pretty clothes and a little—a very little—pocket-money, and did nothing in the way of work except arrange flowers, and write a few notes, and comb out Aunt Pussy’s Flossy, being careful to keep the parting even down the middle of his back.
My sisters became workers, and they also became ardent Suffragists, which would have shocked my father dreadfully if he had been alive, for he was of opinion that woman’s proper sphere is the home, though, of course, if you have not got a home or any money it seems rather difficult for women to remain in their sphere.
I, being provided for, remained perfectly womanly, of the type that the Anti-Suffrage League, and the sterner sex especially, admire. I took care of my appearance, I dressed charmingly on the very small allowance which Aunt Pussy doled out to me, I was an adept at all the little details which make a home pleasant, I never wanted to do anything except to marry Mark.
For across the even tenor of our lives, in a little villa in Kensington, as even as the parting down Flossie’s back, presently came two great events. Aunt Pussy inherited an enormous fortune, and the following year, I being then twenty, fell in love with Mark and accepted him. I can’t tell you whether he, poor dear, was quite disinterested at first. It was, of course, known that I should inherit all my aunt’s money. He was rather above me in the social scale. I have sometimes thought that his old painted, gambling Jezebel of a mother prodded him in my direction.
But if he was not disinterested at first, he became so. We were two perfectly ordinary young people. But we were meant for each other, and we both knew it.