I've surmounted all objections; the chief being Million--I mean "Miss Million"--herself. Her I have practically bullied into letting her ex-mistress come and work for her. After much talk and many protests, I said, finally, "Million, you've got to." And Million finally said: "Very well, Miss Beatrice, if you will 'ave it so, 'ave it so you will. It don't seem right to me, but----" Then there was my Aunt Anastasia, the controller of my destiny up to now. Her I wrote to from that hostelry in Kensington, which was Million's first "move" from No. 45, the Putney villa. And from Aunt Anastasia I received a letter of many sheets in length. Here are a few of the more plum-like extracts: "When I received the communication of your insane plan, Beatrice, I was forced to retire to the privacy of my own apartment"-- (Not so very "private," when the walls are so thin that she can hear the girls in the adjoining room at No. 46 rustling the tissue-paper of the box under the bed that they keep their nicest hats in!) "and to take no fewer than five aspirins before I was able to review the situation with any measure of calm." Then-- "It is well that my poor brother, your father, is not here to see to what depths his only child has descended, and to what a milieu!" (The "descent" being from that potty little row of packing-cases in Putney to the Hotel Cecil, where I am engaging a suite of rooms for Miss Million and her maid to-morrow!) "Your dear great-grandmother, Lady Anastasia, would turn in her grave, did she ever dream that a Miss Lovelace, a descendant of the Lovelaces of Lovelace Court," etc., etc. (But I am not a Lovelace now. I have told Million--I mean, I have requested my new employer--to call me "Smith." Nice, good, old, useful-sounding sort of name. And more appropriate to my present station!) Then my aunt writes: "Your fondness for associating with young men of the bounder class over garden walls and on doorsteps was already a sufficiently severe shock to me. As that particular young man appears to be still about here, poisoning the air of the garden with his tobacco smoke and obviously gazing through the trellis in search of you each evening, I suppose I must acquit him of any complicity in your actions." (I suppose that nice-looking young man at No. 44 has been wondering when I was going to finish giving him Million's address to return that brooch.) There's miles more of Auntie's letter. It ends up with a majestically tearful supplication to me to return to my own kith and kin (meaning herself and the Gainsborough portrait!) and to remember who I am. Nothing will induce me to do so! I've felt another creature since I left No. 45, with the bamboo furniture and the heirlooms. And, oh, what fun I'm going to have over forgetting who I was. Hurray for the new life of liberty and fresh experiences as Miss Million's maid!