YOU have asked me to tell you all about _Judith Crowhurst_. I will tell you something more and begin at the beginning. You will remember that Miss Hardman said to Mrs. Pryor, Mrs. Hardman’s governess: ‘WE need the imprudences, extravagances, mistakes and crimes of a certain number of fathers to sow the seed from which WE reap the harvest of governesses. The daughters of tradespeople, however well educated, must necessarily be under-bred, and as such unfit to be inmates of OUR dwellings, or guardians of OUR children’s minds and persons. WE shall ever prefer to place those about OUR offspring, who have been born and bred with somewhat of the same refinement as OURSELVES.’ I was one of those unhappy women who, mercifully for the upper classes, inherit manners and misery in order that the children of these superior creatures may not put an ‘r’ at the end of ‘idea’ and may learn how to sit down in a chair with propriety. My father was a clergyman holding a small country living. He died when I was five-and-twenty, and I had to teach in order to earn my bread. I obtained a tolerably good situation, but at the end of two years I was informed that, although a clergyman’s daughter would ‘do very well’ so long as her pupils were quite young, it was now time that they should be handed over to a lady who had been accustomed to Society. I had become thoroughly weary of my work. I was not enthusiastic to instruct girls for whom I did not care. I suppose that if I had been a born teacher, I should have been as happy with the little Hardmans as I was in the nursery with my youngest sister now dead. I should not have said to myself, as I did every morning, ‘What does it matter?’ In my leisure moments and holidays during those two years I had written a novel. I could supply conversation and description, but it was very difficult to invent a plot, and still more difficult to invent one which of itself would speak. I had collected a quantity of matter of all kinds before I began, and then I cast about for a frame in which to fit it. At last I settled that my hero, if hero he could be called, should fall in love with a poor but intelligent and educated girl. He had a fortune of about two thousand pounds a year, nearly the whole of which he lost through the defalcations of a brother, whose creditors received about five shillings in the pound. He felt that the fair name of his family was stained, and he was consumed with a passion to repay his brother’s debts and to recover possession of the old house and land which had been sold. He went abroad, worked hard, and met with a lady who was rich whom he really admired. His love for his betrothed had been weakened by absence, the engagement, for some trifling reason, was broken off, and he married the heiress. At the end of five years he returned to England, discharged every liability, and in two years more was the owner of his birthplace. The marriage, alas! was unhappy. There was no obtrusive