A Waif's Progress

With nothing but grudging hospitality standing between her and homeless destitution and an inheritance of "drink on both sides, immorality on both sides, selfishness on both sides, extravagance and folly on both sides," beautiful, engaging and utterly incorrigible Bonnybell Ransome is a force to be reckoned with...

"The kind of love I should like to inspire," continued Miss Ransome, forgetting to kick the snow as she had been doing with childish pleasure, "is the nice quiet sort that would look after me, and keep disagreeable things and people away from me, and never expect anything beyond; but" - with pensive regret, yet not the slightest hesitation - "that is just the kind I never get; what I am offered is always the other - the horrid sort."

He wished he could stop her, but nothing came to him in time to arrest the still more embarrassing revelation that followed.

"I am going to tell you something that will make you laugh," she said in a tone of frank and gently mirthful confidence. "Do you know that when first I knew you, I thought that, of course, you would be like all the rest I was afraid to be left alone in the room with you " She ended with a glance at him of expectant enjoyment of his enjoyment of the joke.

Exhilaration was not quite the leading characteristic of his half-strangled answer.

"May I ask how soon you were undeceived?"

About the author

Rhoda Broughton (29 November 1840 - 5 June 1920) was a novelist and short story writer. Her sophisticated tales were hugely popular and widely read at the turn of the 19th Century.