Elinor Glyn - The Vicissitudes of Evangeline

I wonder so much if it is amusing to be an adventuress, because that is evidently what I shall become now. I read in a book all about it; it is being nice-looking and having nothing to live on, and getting a pleasant time out of life – and I intend to do that! I have certainly nothing to live 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, and those things, so, of course, I am an adventuress! I was not intended for this rôle – in fact Mrs. Carruthers adopted me on purpose to leave me her fortune, as at that time she had quarrelled with her heir, who was bound to get the place. Then she was so inconsequent as not to make a proper will – thus it is that this creature gets everything, and I nothing!

I am twenty, and up to the week before last, when Mrs. Carruthers got ill, and died in one day, I had had a fairly decent time at odd moments when she was in a good temper.

There is no use pretending even when people are dead, if one is writing down one’s real thoughts. I detested Mrs. Carruthers most of the time. A person whom it was impossible to please. She had no idea of justice, or of anything but her own comfort, and what amount of pleasure other people could contribute to her day!

How she came to do anything for me at all was because she had been in love with papa, and when he married poor mamma – a person of no family – and then died, she offered to take me, and bring me up, just to spite mamma, she has often told me. As I was only four I had no say in the 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 had not worried to get married, so that is how it is poor mamma came to have no relations. After papa was dead she married an Indian officer, and went off to India, and died too, and I never saw her any more – so there it 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, can I?

Mrs. Carruthers periodically quarrelled with all the neighbours, so beyond frigid calls now and then in a friendly interval, we never saw them much. Several old, worldly ladies used to come to stay, but I liked none of them, and I have no young friends. When it is getting dark, and I am up here alone, I often wonder what it would be like if I had – but I believe I am the kind of cat that would not have got on with them too nicely – so perhaps it is just as well; only to have had a pretty – 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 suitable husband is what she brought me up for, she said, and for the last years had arranged that I should marry her detested heir, Christopher Carruthers, as I should have the money, and he the place.

He is a diplomat, and lives in Paris, and Russia, and amusing places like that, so he does not often come to England. I have never seen him. He is quite old – over thirty – and has hair turning gray.

Now he is master here, and I must leave – unless he proposes to marry me at our meeting this afternoon, which he probably won’t do.

However, there can be no harm in my making myself look as attractive as possible under the circumstances. As I am to be an adventuress, I must do the best I can for myself. Nice feelings are for people who have money to live as they please. If I had ten thousand a year, or even five, I would snap my fingers at all men, and say, “No, I make my life as I choose, and shall cultivate knowledge and books, and indulge in beautiful ideas of honour and exalted sentiments, and perhaps one day succumb to a noble passion.” (What grand words the thought even is making me write!!) But as it is, if Mr. Carruthers asks me to marry him, as he has been told to do by his aunt, I shall certainly say yes, and so stay on here, and have a comfortable home. Until I have had this interview it is hardly worth while packing anything.

What a mercy black suits me! My skin is ridiculously white – I shall stick a bunch of violets in my frock, that could not look heartless, I suppose. But if he asks me if I am sad about Mrs. Carruthers’ death, I shall not be able to tell a lie.

I am sad, of course, because death is a terrible thing, and to die like that, saying spiteful things to every one, must be horrid – but I can’t, I can’t regret her! Not a day ever passed that she did not sting some part of me – when I was little, it was not only with her tongue, she used to pinch me, and box my ears until Doctor Garrison said it might make me deaf, and then she stopped, because she said deaf people were a bore, and she could not put up with them.

I shall not go on looking back! There are numbers of things that even now make me raging to remember.

I have only been out for a year. Mrs. Carruthers got an attack of bronchitis when I was eighteen, just as we were going up to town for the season, and said she did not feel well enough for the fatigues, and off we went to Switzerland. And in the autumn we travelled all over the place, and in the winter she coughed and groaned, and the next season would not go up until the last court, so I have only had a month of London. The bronchitis got perfectly well, it was heart-failure that killed her, brought on by an attack of temper because Thomas broke the Carruthers vase.

I shall not write of her death, or the finding of the will, or the surprise that I was left nothing but a thousand pounds, and a diamond ring.

Now that I am an adventuress, instead of an heiress, of what good to chronicle all that! Sufficient to say if Mr. Carruthers does not obey his orders, and offer me his hand this afternoon, I shall have to pack my trunks, and depart by Saturday – but where to is yet in the lap of the gods!

He is coming by the 3.20 train, and will be in the house before four, an ugly, dull time; one can’t offer him tea, and it will be altogether trying and exciting.

He is coming ostensibly to take over his place, I suppose, but in reality it is to look at me, and see if in any way he will be able to persuade himself to carry out his aunt’s wishes. I wonder what it will be like to be married to some one you don’t know, and don’t like? I am not greatly acquainted yet with the ways of men. We have not had any that you could call that here, much – only a lot of old wicked sort of things, in the autumn, to shoot the pheasants, and play bridge with Mrs. Carruthers. The marvel to me was how they ever killed anything, such antiques they were! Some Politicians and ex-Ambassadors, and creatures of that sort; and mostly as wicked as could be. They used to come trotting down the passage to the schoolroom, and have tea with Mademoiselle and me on the slightest provocation! and say such things! I am sure lots of what they said meant something else, Mademoiselle used to giggle so. She was rather a good-looking one I had the last four years, but I hated her. There was never anyone young and human who counted.

I did look forward to coming out in London, but, being so late, every one was preoccupied when we got there – and no one got in love with me much. Indeed, we went out very little, a part of the time I had a swollen nose from a tennis ball at Ranelagh – and people don’t look at girls with swollen noses.

I wonder where I shall go and live! Perhaps in Paris – unless, of course, I marry Mr. Carruthers, – I don’t suppose it is dull being married. In London all the married ones seemed to have a lovely time, and had not to bother with their husbands much.