Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. AnstrutherVon Arnim, Elizabeth
General
Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther
Von Arnim, Elizabeth
British -- Germany -- Fiction; Epistolary fiction; Germany -- Fiction; Love stories; Young women -- Fiction
Today I am humble and hanging my head, for I have discovered to my pain
and horror that Papa and I are living well beyond our income. I expect
we have bought too many books, and spent too much in stamps to be used
by publishers; but it is certain that we've already consumed over
seventy pounds of our yearly hundred, and that we only took five months
to do it in. What do you think of that? We have been squandering money
right and left somehow. There were no clothes to buy, for what we have
will last us at least two years, and where it has all gone to I can't
imagine. Indeed I am a useless person if I cannot even manage a tiny
house like this and make such sufficient means do. Papa has written to
Professor Martens to tell him he is willing to take in a young man
again. Willing? He is eager, hungry for a young man, for he sees that
without one things will go badly with us. And I, remembering the wealth
we enjoyed while Mr. Collins was with us, have written to him to ask if
he cares to come back and finish learning German. I don't know if he
still wants to, or rather if his father still wants him to, for German
to Joey was as the fly in the apothecary's ointment, in its extreme
offensiveness, nor have I told Papa that I wrote, because of the
peculiar horror with which he regards Joey; but I couldn't resist when I
know that six months of Joey would deliver us for two whole years from
all young men whatever, and I hope when the time comes, if it ever does,
and Joey with it, to persuade Papa by judicious argument of the eminent
desirability of this particular young man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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