«Miss Cayley's Adventures»

_MISS CAYLEY'S ADVENTURES_ (1899), ch. 1 by Grant Allen published by Grant
Richards I THE ADVENTURE OF THE CANTANKEROUS OLD LADY ON the day when I found
myself with twopence in my pocket, I naturally made up my mind to go round the
world. It was my stepfather's death that drove me to it. I had never seen my
stepfather. Indeed, I never even thought of him as anything more than Colonel
Watts-Morgan. I owed him nothing, except my poverty. He married my dear mother
when I was a girl at school in Switzerland; and he proceeded to spend her little
fortune, left at her sole disposal by my father's will, in paying his gambling
debts. After that, he carried my dear mother off to Burma; and when he and the
climate between them had succeeded in killing her, he made up for his
appropriations at the cheapest rate by allowing me just enough to send me to
Girton. So, when the Colonel died, in the year I was leaving college, I did not
think it necessary to go into mourning for him. Especially as he chose the
precise moment when my allowance was due, and bequeathed me nothing but his
consolidated liabilities. 'Of course you will teach,' said Elsie Petheridge,
when I explained my affairs to her. 'There is a good demand just now for high-school
teachers.' I looked at her, aghast. 'Teach! Elsie, I cried (I had come up to
town to settle her in at her unfurnished lodgings.) 'Did you say teach? That's
just like you dear good schoolmistresses! You go to Cambridge, and get examined
till the heart and life have been examined out of you; then you say to
yourselves at the end of it all, "Let me see; what am I good for now? I'm just
about fit to go away and examine other people!" That's what our Principal would
call "a vicious circle"--if one could ever admit there was anything vicious at
all about you, dear. No, Elsie, I do not propose to teach. Nature did not cut me
out for a high-school teacher. I couldn't swallow a poker if I tried for weeks.
Pokers don't agree with me. Between ourselves, I am a bit of a rebel.' 'You are,
Brownie,' she answered, pausing in her papering, with her sleeves rolled up--they
called me 'Brownie,' partly because of my dark complexion, but partly because
they could never understand me. 'We all knew that long ago.' I laid down the
paste-brush and mused. 'Do you remember, Elsie,' I said, staring hard at the
paper-board, 'when I first went to Girton, how all you girls wore your hair
quite straight, in neat smooth coils, plaited up at the back about the size of a
pancake; and how of a sudden I burst in upon you, like a tropical hurricane, and
demoralised you; and how, after three days of me, some of the dear innocents
began with awe to cut themselves artless fringes, while others went out in fear
and trembling and surreptitiously purchased a pair of curling-tongs? I was a
bomb-shell in your midst in those days; why, you yourself were almost afraid at
first to speak to me.