"Dear Captain Blair, "Martin is engaged to Grizel Dundas. She is giving up thirty thousand a year to marry him, and he is going to let her do it. I sent Dorothea a cutting from the newspaper, which no doubt you have seen, so I need not enlarge upon the details of a `millionaire's extraordinary will,' and the subsequent `Romantic engagement. Millionaire's heiress gives up her fortune to marry well-known novelist.' (See _Morning Post_.) "The marriage is to be in January, and we are house-hunting, answering letters of congratulation, looking at patterns, discussing dresses and wallpapers, and hats, and carpets, and what to do with drawing-room walls, and where to find new places for such trifles as sideboards, and buffets, and bookcases, and maiden sisters... They'll fit in somewhere, I suppose, and look fairly comfortable and at home in their new positions, but it will take a little settling down! The sideboard was made especially to fit a niche here; the maiden sister thought she was, too, but they've both got to move, and look distrustfully upon new corners. "Grizel spent a week with us, then went off on a round of visits. She has left the old house and given up her claim to the money at once, so as to avoid all appearance of `making a purse' for Martin's benefit. They are preposterously happy, and have each explained to me most carefully that the other is _so_ anxious for me to live with them, and confessed that from their _own_ standpoint it might perhaps be better-- for a time at least ... and I have relieved their feelings, poor dears, by proclaiming at once that nothing could bribe me, either sooner or later. "Now, Lonely Man, go down on your knees and thank Providence, fasting, that you are not a woman! You've done it heaps of times before, but do it once again. No man in the world could find himself in such a position as I am in at this moment, at twenty-six, _past_, after doing my duty in my appointed place for a painstaking eight years. For what have I gained--in what single way have I prepared myself for the journey ahead? I can keep house satisfactorily on a satisfactory income, but I shall have no house to keep; I can train servants, but I shall have no servants to train. In any case I could have learned as much in one year, and I've wasted eight! Not _wasted_, you'll say, as it was an obvious duty to look after Martin's home, but the fact remains that the years have gone by, and left me at the end, adrift, with the alternative of living on charity, or working for myself, and no work that I can do! Too young to be a housekeeper, too old to begin a training.