The Reflections of Ambrosine A Novel by Elinor Glyn NOTE In thanking the readers who were kind enough to appreciate my "Visits of Elizabeth," I take this opportunity of saying that I did not write the two other books which appeared anonymously. The titles of those works were so worded that they gave the public the impression that I was their author. I have never written any book but the "Visits of Elizabeth." Everything that I write will be signed with my name, ELINOR GLYN BOOK I I I have wondered sometimes if there are not perhaps some disadvantages in having really blue blood in one's veins, like grandmamma and me. For instance, if we were ordinary, common people our teeth would chatter naturally with cold when we have to go to bed without fires in our rooms in December; but we pretend we like sleeping in "well-aired rooms"--at least I have to. Grandmamma simply says we are obliged to make these small economies, and to grumble would be to lose a trick to fate. "Rebel if you can improve matters," she often tells me, "but otherwise accept them with calmness." We have had to accept a good many things with calmness since papa made that tiresome speculation in South America. Before that we had a nice apartment in Paris and as many fires as we wished. However, in spite of the comfort, grandmamma hated papa's "making" money. It was not the career of a gentleman, she said, and when the smash came and one heard no more of papa, I have an idea she was almost relieved. We came first over to England, and, after long wanderings backward and forward, took this little furnished place at the corner of Ledstone Park. It is just a cottage--once a keeper's, I believe--and we have only Hephzibah and a wretched servant-girl to wait on us. Hephzibah was my nurse in America before we ever went to Paris, and she is as ugly as a card-board face on Guy Fawkes day, and as good as gold.