A Sensible Life
Mary Wesley
 In 1926 Mr and Mrs Trevelyan from England are holidaying in Brittany with their ten-year-old daughter, Flora. The two parents openly despise and neglect the young girl, who is left to occupy herself whilst they prepare to depart for a life in colonial India without her. Left to herself Flora gradually befriends the locals and the other guests at the hotel, who show her more attention and kindness than she receives from her parents. Flora soon falls helplessly in love with no less than three young men (Cosmo, Blanco and Felix) who are also staying at the hotel, and she is crestfallen when the holidays are over and they have to leave. When her parents leave for India Flora is left at a boarding school in England where she will spend the following seven years. Only once is Flora invited to spend her holidays with the Leighs, whom she met in Brittany, and in the years that follow she is only in casual contact with the Leighs and Cosmo, Blanco and Felix. When Flora is seventeen she is supposed to go to India to meet her parents who then will find her a suitable husband, but Flora decides to get off the ship in Marseilles and return to England. Back in England she has to make a living on her own and becomes a housemaid for a family in London and later in the West Country. She begins to live an independent and sensible life.