She was a woman of good blood and of good education, as the education of such women goes.  She had few relatives, and none of them had any intention of burdening themselves with her pennilessness.  They were people of excellent family, but had quite enough to do to keep their sons in the army or navy and find husbands for their daughters.  When Emily’s mother had died and her small annuity had died with her, none of them had wanted the care of a big raw-boned girl, and Emily had had the situation frankly explained to her.  At eighteen she had begun to work as assistant teacher in a small school; the year following she had taken a place as nursery-governess; then she had been reading-companion to an unpleasant old woman in Northumberland.  The old woman had lived in the country, and her relatives had hovered over her like vultures awaiting her decease.  The household had been gloomy and gruesome enough to have driven into melancholy madness any girl not of the sanest and most matter-of-fact temperament.  Emily Fox-Seton had endured it with an unfailing good nature, which at last had actually awakened in the breast of her mistress a ray of human feeling.  When the old woman at length died, and Emily was to be turned out into the world, it was revealed that she had been left a legacy of a few hundred pounds, and a letter containing some rather practical, if harshly expressed, advice.

Go back to London [Mrs. Maytham had written in her feeble, crabbed hand].  You are not clever enough to do anything remarkable in the way of earning your living, but you are so good-natured that you can make yourself useful to a lot of helpless creatures who will pay you a trifle for looking after them and the affairs they are too lazy or too foolish to manage for themselves.  You might get on to one of the second-class fashion-papers to answer ridiculous questions about house-keeping or wall-papers or freckles.  You know the kind of thing I mean.  You might write notes or do accounts and shopping for some lazy woman.  You are a practical, honest creature, and you have good manners.  I have often thought that you had just the kind of commonplace gifts that a host of commonplace people want to find at their service.  An old servant of mine who lives in Mortimer Street would probably give you cheap, decent lodgings, and behave well to you for my sake.  She has reason to be fond of me.  Tell her I sent you to her, and that she must take you in for ten shillings a week.

Emily wept for gratitude, and ever afterward enthroned old Mrs. Maytham on an altar as a princely and sainted benefactor, though after she had invested her legacy she got only twenty pounds a year from it.

“It was so kind of her,” she used to say with heartfelt humbleness of spirit.  “I never dreamed of her doing such a generous thing.  I hadn’t a shadow of a claim upon her—­not a shadow.”  It was her way to express her honest emotions with emphasis which italicised, as it were, her outpourings of pleasure or appreciation.