of the Works of
Elinor Glyn
AUBURN, N. Y.
Copyright, 1905, by
ELINOR GLYN
this book was published under the title
"The Vicissitudes of Evangeline."
Branches Park,
November 3.
I wonder so much if it is amusing to be an adventuress, because that isevidently what I shall become now. I read in a book all about it; it isbeing nice looking and having nothing to live on, and getting a pleasanttime out of life—and I intend to do that! I have certainly nothing tolive on, for one cannot count £300 a year; and I am extremely pretty,and I know it quite well, and how to do my hair, and put on my hats, andthose things—so, of course, I am an adventuress! I was not intended forthis rôle—in fact, Mrs. Carruthers adopted me on purpose to leave meher fortune, as at that time she had quarrelled with her heir, who wasbound to get the place. Then she was so inconsequent as not to make aproper will—thus it is that this creature gets everything, and Inothing!
I am twenty, and up to the week before last, when Mrs. Carruthers gotill and died in one day, I had had a fairly decent time at odd momentswhen she was in a good temper.
There is no use pretending even when people are dead, if one is writingdown one's real thoughts. I detested Mrs. Carruthers most of the time. Aperson whom it was impossible to please. She had no idea of justice, orof anything but her own comfort, and what amount of pleasure otherpeople could contribute to her day.
How she came to do anything for me at all was because she had been inlove with papa, and when he married poor mamma—a person of nofamily—and then died, she offered to take me, and bring me up, just tospite mamma, she has often told me. As I was only four I had no say inthe matter, and if mamma liked to give me up that was her affair.Mamma's father was a lord, and her mother I don't know who, and they hadnot worried to get married, so that is how it is poor mamma came to haveno relations. After papa was dead, she married an Indian officer andwent off to India, and died, too, and I never saw her any more—so thereit is; there is not a soul in the world who matters to me, or I to them,so I can't help being an adventuress, and thinking only of myself, canI?
Mrs. Carruthers periodically quarrelled with all the neighbors, sobeyond frigid calls now and then in a friendly interval, we never sawthem much. Several old, worldly ladies used to come and stay, but Iliked none of them, and I have no young friends. When it is gettingdark, and I am up here alone, I often wonder what it would be like if Ihad—but I believe I am the kind of cat that would not have got on withthem too nicely—so perhaps it is just as well. Only, to have had apretty—aunt, say—to love one—that might have been nice.
Mrs. Carruthers had no feelings like this; "stuff and nonsense,""sentimental rubbish," she would have called them. To get a suitablehusband is what she brought me up for, she said, and for the last yearshad arranged that I should marry her detested heir, ChristopherCarruthers, as I should have the money and he the place.
He is a diplomat, and lives in Paris, and Russia, and amusing placeslike that, so he does not often come to England. I have never seen him.He is qu