elevenpence halfpenny if you please, ma’am.”  Of course you have not enough silver, and so are obliged to wait for change.  Then someone has to be found to sign.  Altogether it takes quite five minutes longer paying ready money; and think, how five minutes after each purchase would mount up in a day’s shopping!  I should say that, on an average you might call it two important hours regularly thrown away.  “And a good job, too,” perhaps our fathers, husbands, and brothers would say.  But, then, you see, they are Philistines and do not understand.

But though we suffer somewhat at the hands of these shop people, I think in their turn they have to endure a great deal more from their customers.  I have seen old ladies order nearly the whole shop out, turn over the articles, and having entirely exhausted the patience of their victims, say, “Yes—­all very pretty—­but I don’t think I will buy any to-day, thank you,” and they move off to other counters to enact the same scene over again.  Selfish old things!

I was dreadfully hard up a short time ago, and of course my bills were ten times as big as usual.  I had no money coming in, and could not conceive how I was to meet my debts.

It is astonishing, when you come to try it, how few paths there are open for poverty-stricken ladies to make a little money, especially when your object is to keep your difficulties a secret from your mankind.  I tried every imaginable way without success.  What is the good of having an expensive education, of being taught French and German—­neither of which languages, by the way, when brought to the test, a girl can ever talk, or at any rate so as to be understood.  What is the good of it all, I say, when you want to turn your hand to making a little money?  I felt quite angry the other day when, our cook being ill, we had a woman in to take her place.  Fifteen shillings a week she made!  She, who had had little or nothing spent on her education, could yet make more shillings in a week than I could pence!  I began to wish I had been brought up as a scullery maid.

I can paint rather well, but what are the advantages of art compared to those of cookery?  Many and many a shop I went into, carrying specimens of my talent, and asking the owners if they would employ me to decorate their tambourines, bellows, &c.  But no, they all had their own especial artists, and were quite suited.  It is such a dreadfully humiliating business.  At the first place I could have slain the man for his impertinence in declining, and I left the shop with a haughty mien and my head in the air.  But I grew accustomed to it in time, and even used to try a little persuasion, which, however, proved of no avail.  One man offered to exhibit my wares (I felt quite like a peddler going his rounds), and through him I sold two tambourines.  Then who so proud as I? though my profits only came to a few shillings.  However small, the first taste of success is always exhilarating, though indeed my confidence did not last long, for this was my first and last experience of money-making in the painting line.