LIZABETH WHARTON had every inducement to be modern and efficient; she had an active mind, three hundred a year, no responsibilities, a good education, and naturally, as an outcome of all these things, a fairly complete self-assurance. Of course she had not had very much experience, for she was only twenty-three, but she rather despised experience, and she was exceptionally well armed with theories.
Her mother had recently married again and gone to America, and Elizabeth lived with a friend of the same type in rooms, that were fairly cheap and decidedly picturesque, somewhere off the Fulham Road. Elizabeth was studying for the Bar; she had, in fact, only one more examination before her, and she looked on this as an expert rider looks upon the last fence to be leapt before certain victory.
Elizabeth was quite happy in her fairly complete self-assurance; she was young, healthy, and very much in earnest, and though she wore glasses and shingled hair, she had a certain satisfaction—unconscious, perhaps—in the exquisite cut of her one-piece serge frocks, in the perfection of her pale silk stockings, and the gleam of her openwork patent-leather shoes.
If she had not been an efficient young woman, she would have been a pretty young girl, for she did not really need glasses—they were just part of her kit, like an officer's epaulettes—and her hair was the kind that wanted so hard to be long and curly that she had to crop it every week.
Her friend, Connie Smeeton, firmly supported her in her attitude towards life, for Connie could never have been charming. If she had not been efficient, she would have been merely dull and perhaps disagreeable. She intended to be an engineer, and she was a little plain and more than a little dowdy.
Connie was always slightly apprehensive lest Elizabeth should, in some moment of aberration, spoil her career and betray her standard by marriage. "If only you don't fall in love" she would say, with a sigh.
At which Elizabeth would be serenely amused. Elizabeth knew all about love; she had read quite a number of scientific works on the subject. Marriage she regarded as a pitiful survival of the Middle Ages, all very well, perhaps, for ordinary stupid women, but for anyone like herself or Connie
"Falling in love," said Elizabeth, "is the last folly of an idle, ill-educated mind feebly searching for diversion, and marriage is the last refuge of all the women who are not any good for anything else."
And then Elizabeth came into a fortune, a real fortune; it was left her by an uncle who had quarrelled with her entirely over her choice of a "career." The old tyrant had actually wanted her to live with him, to pour out his coffee in the morning, his tea in the afternoon, and play cribbage in the evening. On her indignant refusal, he had called her "a hard young fool," but now he had died and left her all he possessed on condition that she managed the property herself and took up residence in the old Manor House; also everything was to go to a distant relation if and when she married.
Elizabeth cried secretly. If the old man had been reasonable, she would have liked him, and she had always fostered the hope that one day she would both startle and win him by some sparkling forensic display when she was a full-fledged barrister.
"Of course it is a challenge," remarked Connie. "The old idiot thought you would make a mess of everything, and that would teach you a lesson."
"I suppose so," returned Elizabeth dubiously. "Poor dear, he was such a hopeless reactionary. I don't think I'll accept; it just means smashing up my life-work," she added with the air of forty-five at least.
But Connie was a shrewd young person. She said: "Elizabeth, you know that you've only got three hundred, and it's really an awful pinch, even the two of us living like this. It is no use just being stiff-necked. You might find a life-work in looking after this place."
"Oh, yes," agreed Elizabeth. "Poor Uncle Joshua ran everything in the most archaic fashion. The place must be chaotic. And of course I know a great deal about property administration, estate work, and model farming."
"Well," replied Connie, who for a long time had seen little prospect of earning either fame or money at engineering, "I think you ought to take this on; it seems, in a way, your job. I can come with you for a bit," she added generously, "to give you moral support."
Elizabeth thanked her, but declared that she was in absolutely no need of moral support, so Connie had to offer her company on the usual terms of a mere guest.