Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: turned wholly penniless and alono into the world. So, when everything was arranged, I found myself possessed of my little girl, of complete personal freedom, and of a small monthly income sufficient for respectable starvation. The "world was all before us where to choose ", but circumstances narrowed the choice down to Hobson's. I had no ready money beyond the first month's payment of my annuity; furnished lodgings wore beyond my moans, and I had nothing wherewith to buy furniture. My brother offered me a homo, on condition that I should give up my " heretical friends " and keep quiet; but, being freed from one bondage, nothing was further from my thoughts than to enter another. Besides, I did not choose to be a burden ; on anyone, and I resolved to "get something to do", to , rent a tiny house, and to make a nest where my mother, my little girl, and I could live happily together. The difficulty was the "something"; I spent various shillings in agencies, with a quite wonderful unanimity of failures. I tried to get some fancy needlework, advertised as an infallible source of income to '' ladies in reduced circumstances "; I fitted the advertisement admirably, for I was a lady, and my circumstances were decidedly reduced, but I only earned 4s. Gd. by weeks of stitching, and the materials cost nearly as much as the finished work. I experimented with a Birmingham firm, who generously offered everyone an opportunity of adding to their incomes, and , received in answer to the small fee demanded a pencil-case, with an explanation that I was to sell little articles of that description—going as far as cruet-stands—to my friends; I did not feel equal to springing pencil-cases and cruet- stands casually on my acquaintances, so did not start in that business. It would be idle to r...