'Oh yes, it's quite easy. You'll soon learn it,' spoken with feet wide apart and an expression of careless importance, as who should say, 'What a sensible man you are! Still, these _are_ little things one has to be careful about, you know.' Mother poured out tea, somewhat laboriously, as though the exact proportions of milk, hot water, and sugar each child took were difficult to remember. Each had a special cup, moreover. Her mind, ever crammed with a thousand domestic details which she seemed to carry all at once upon the surface, ready for any sudden question, found it difficult to concentrate upon the teapot. Her mind was ever worrying over these. Her husband was too vague to be of practical help. When any one spoke to her, she would pause in the middle of the operation, balancing a cup in one hand and a milk jug in the other, until the question was properly answered, every t crossed and every i dotted. There was no mistaking what Mother meant--provided you had the time to listen. She had that careful thoroughness which was no friend of speed. The result was that hands were stretched out for second cups long before she had completed the first round. Her own tea began usually when everybody else had finished--and lasted--well, some time. 'Here's a letter I got,' announced Jimbo, pulling a very dirty scrap of paper from a pocket hidden beneath many folds of blouse. 'You'd like to see it.' He handed it across the round table, and Rogers took it politely. 'Thank you very much; it came by this morning's post, did it?' 'Oh, no,' was the reply, as though a big correspondence made the date of little importance. 'Not by _that_ post.' But Monkey blurted out with the jolly laughter that was her characteristic sound, 'It came ages ago. He's had it in his pocket for weeks.' Jimbo, ignoring the foolish interruption, watched his cousin's face, while Jinny gave her sister a secret nudge that every one could see. 'Darling Jimbo,' was what Rogers read, 'I have been to school, and did strokes and prickings and marched round. I am like you now. A fat kiss and a hug, your loving---' The signature was illegible, lost amid several scratchy lines in a blot that looked as if a beetle had expired after violent efforts in a pool of ink. 'Very nice indeed, very well put,' said Rogers, handing it gravely back again, while some one explained that the writer, aged five, had just gone to a kindergarten school in Geneva. 'And have you answered it?' 'Oh, yes. I answered it the same day, you see.' It was, perhaps, a foolish letter for a man to have in his pocket. Still--it was a letter. 'Good! What a capital secretary you'll make me.' And the boy's flush of pleasure almost made the dish of butter rosy.