‘I think I shall leave off.’

‘And begin again next year?’

‘That is very doubtful.’

‘I’ll tell you what you might do,’ said Picotee, her face kindling with a sense of great originality.  ’You might travel about to country towns and tell your story splendidly.’

’A man in my position might perhaps do it with impunity; but I could not without losing ground in other domains.  A woman may drive to Mayfair from her house in Exonbury Crescent, and speak from a platform there, and be supposed to do it as an original way of amusing herself; but when it comes to starring in the provinces she establishes herself as a woman of a different breed and habit.  I wish I were a man!  I would give up this house, advertise it to be let furnished, and sally forth with confidence.  But I am driven to think of other ways to manage than that.’

Picotee fell into a conjectural look, but could not guess.

‘The way of marriage,’ said Ethelberta.  ’Otherwise perhaps the poetess may live to become what Dryden called himself when he got old and poor—­a rent-charge on Providence. . . . .  Yes, I must try that way,’ she continued, with a sarcasm towards people out of hearing.  I must buy a “Peerage” for one thing, and a “Baronetage,” and a “House of Commons,” and a “Landed Gentry,” and learn what people are about me.  ’I must go to Doctors’ Commons and read up wills of the parents of any likely gudgeons I may know.  I must get a Herald to invent an escutcheon of my family, and throw a genealogical tree into the bargain in consideration of my taking a few second-hand heirlooms of a pawnbroking friend of his.  I must get up sham ancestors, and find out some notorious name to start my pedigree from.  It does not matter what his character was; either villain or martyr will do, provided that he lived five hundred years ago.  It would be considered far more creditable to make good my descent from Satan in the age when he went to and fro on the earth than from a ministering angel under Victoria.’

‘But, Berta, you are not going to marry any stranger who may turn up?’ said Picotee, who had creeping sensations of dread when Ethelberta talked like this.

’I had no such intention.  But, having once put my hand to the plough, how shall I turn back?’

‘You might marry Mr. Ladywell,’ said Picotee, who preferred to look at things in the concrete.

’Yes, marry him villainously; in cold blood, without a moment to prepare himself.’

‘Ah, you won’t!’

’I am not so sure about that.  I have brought mother and the children to town against her judgment and against my father’s; they gave way to my opinion as to one who from superior education has larger knowledge of the world than they.  I must prove my promises, even if Heaven should fall upon me for it, or what a miserable future will theirs be!  We must not be poor in London.  Poverty in the country is a sadness, but poverty in town is a horror.  There is something not without grandeur in the thought of starvation on an open mountain or in a wide wood, and your bones lying there to bleach in the pure sun and rain; but a back garret in a rookery, and the other starvers in the room insisting on keeping the window shut—­anything to deliver us from that!’