If “necessity is the mother of invention,” experience is the handmaid of wisdom, and her garments fit well. Flora was as yet a novice to the world and its ways. She had much to learn from a stern and faithful preceptress, in a cold, calculating school.
CHAPTER VII.
HOW MISS WILHELMINA CARR AND FLORA BECAME ACQUAINTED.
Among the many persons who called upon Flora to talk over her projected emigration was a Miss Wilhelmina Carr—a being so odd, so wayward, so unlike the common run of mortals, that we must endeavour to give a slight sketch of her to our readers. We do not possess sufficient artistic skill to do Miss Wilhelmina justice; for if she had not actually lived and walked the earth, and if we had not seen her with our own eyes, and heard her with our own ears, we should have considered her a very improbable, if not an impossible, variety of the human species feminine. We have met with many absurd people in our journey through life, but a more eccentric individual never before nor since has come under our immediate observation.
Flora’s means were far too limited for her to entertain company. Her visitors were confined entirely to her own family, and a few old and chosen friends, with whom she had been intimate from childhood. How, then, did she become acquainted with this lady? Oddly enough; for everything connected with Miss Carr was odd, and out of the common way.
There was a mystery, too, about Miss Carr, which had kept the gossips busy for the last four months, and clever and prying as they were—quite models in their way—not one of them had been able to come at the solution of the riddle.
One hot day during the preceding summer, Miss Wilhelmina walked into the town, wearing a man’s broad-brimmed straw hat, and carrying a cane in her hand, with a very small dog trotting at her heels. She inquired at the first hotel in the town for lodgings, and hired two very handsome apartments of Mrs. Turner, who kept very respectable lodgings, and was patronised by the best families in the neighbourhood. Miss Wilhelmina paid three months’ rent in advance; she brought no servant, and was to find her own table, engaging Mrs. Turner to cook and wait upon her.
Some days after her arrival, two large travelling trunks, and several well-filled hampers full of wine of the best quality, were forwarded to her direction, and Miss Carr became one of the lions of the little watering-place.
Who she was, or from what quarter of the world she emanated, nobody could find out. She had evidently plenty of money at her command, lived as she liked and did what she pleased, and seemed perfectly indifferent as to what others thought of her.