Mrs. Carteret recovered and the two faced starvation. Then for her child’s sake Millicent wrote to her aunt, and received much scornful criticism in return, more sound advice, and a promise of a hundred dollars a month. After that life was a succession of cheap pensions, with poor food, dingy company, and always some idle husband who made love to the indestructibly charming Millicent; to the expressed indignation of his wife. Constant peregrinations interfered with Gita’s schooling but she received an education of sorts. She was quick at languages and had ample opportunity to pick them up. As men ogled her on the street as well as in the pensions she abandoned the graceful languid carriage that had been a part of her anxious training, throwing back her shoulders and striding along like a stiff young soldier on parade; finally, to her mother’s wailing accompaniment, cut off her abundant black hair. “I should have been a boy anyhow,” she told the superlatively feminine Millicent. “It was a horrid mistake of Nature. Then I not only could have taken you out of this rotten poverty-stricken life one day, and given you lovely gowns and delicate food, but I could have stood up to these awful men that annoy you.” When she was seventeen the old aunt died and left her small fortune and the house built by the first Sears to adventure in California, to “my only remaining relative and not unloved niece, Millicent Sears Carteret.” The heiress decided to leave Europe, which she frankly hoped never to see again, and take her child to San Francisco. It was far from Carteret Manor, pride had gone the way of vanity, and she longed for her old friends; moreover, Gita could finish her education and have proper associates for the first time.