My dear Marian,

You will not receive this letter until I am dead and buried. Since we have been strangers in life, there is no need for you to pretend to a sorrow you cannot feel, or to be plunged into the intricacies of family relationships in the morbid atmosphere induced by a funeral. If you decide to meet your relations-and I suppose you may find youself obliged to do so-let it be in circumstances which do not encourage the emotions. I am afraid you must be prepared for these emotions to include hurt feelings, resentment, jealousy, and so forth, but not any personal grief. My relations do not love me any more than I love them. You will naturally ask yourself, since you cannot ask me, why I should have harboured a houseful of them for so many years. The answer is a very simple one. At first the arrangement was one of mutual convenience. I was a helpless widower and a natural prey to the womanly feelings of any unattached female relative. A not sufficiently distant cousin who had become my brother Alfred’s widow settled on me with her son. She is Mrs. Alfred Brand, your Aunt Florence, a large woman with small, determined aims. Her son Felix plays the piano. After a year or two the constant visits of Florence ’s unmarried sister, Cassy Remington, merged into permanent residence at my expense. She also is related to you, and will doubtless make herself quite as unpleasant as if the relationship were a much nearer one.

So much for preliminaries. When I made up my mind that I would rather leave my money to a dogs’ home than to anyone in what Florence calls the family circle, I thought that before proceeding to such extremities I would have to look at you and at your sister. I knew where you were, because your father wrote to me during the last week of his life. My reaction at the time was that it was rather late in the day to expect me to be interested. I did, however, instruct my solicitors to make some enquiries, and to furnish me with a quarterly report. I saw no reason why you should not, in the words of the Catechism, learn and labour truly to get your own living, but in a case of extremity I was prepared to intervene. Not to put too fine a point upon it, I considered that I had enough dependent relations and had no wish to add to their number.