_My dear_, she wrote to her sister, _I can’t come yet. If I do I shall spoil such sport as never you saw. I told you Belinda Seneschal had compelled me to become her guest—at half an hour’s notice, quite late last Monday night. And I told you why. Well, it’s better than any play you ever thought of. Captain Pomeroy is a perfectly charming man. He’s tall and fair, and he’s got a merry eye and a very good nose. He’s thirty-four, clean-shaven and laughs delightedly. Very easy-going and a strong sense of humour. We get on admirably. He loves Belinda very much. Belinda’s dark and a beauty. Great brown eyes and an exquisite mouth: straight as an arrow, and the figure that everyone wants. You know. The more you take off, the better it looks. In her bathing-dress. . . . And she’s really a sweet girl. Since I turned fifty I’ve learned to expect nothing from twenty-five. But this child is not like that. Belinda treats me as if I were her very rich aunt. But she treats Ivan Pomeroy as if he were a hideous wedding-present which she can’t throw out for fear of offending the donor—a certain sign of love, as you will agree._ _Well, there you are, Mary._ _Tuesday—my first day here—was rather hectic. The servants, of course. Rival staffs in the same basement, determined to serve two masters with the same range and pantry at the same time, were almost bound to realize the worst misgivings of The Litany—even if they were all compatriots, which they aren’t. Ivan has brought out his English servants. Only a man could do such a hopeless thing. An English cook-housekeeper who can’t talk a word of French and is accustomed to dealing in St. James’s! Can you see her in a French market? More. Can you see her in a French kitchen, explaining in the tone one reserves for the stone-deaf to a French cook who believes in France for the French that ‘the Captain deserved the best and it wouldn’t be her fault if he didn’t get it’? I intervened at last, to prevent murder being done. The French butler had been ducked in the sink and then shut in the coal-cellar. This, because he had intimated that the kitchen crockery was good enough for Ivan. The_ brosseur _had been obstructive when Ivan’s housemaid had sought for a dust-pan and brush and, when she found them, had tried to drag them away. Polly criticized his conduct, and the_ brosseur _pinched her arm. Ivan’s chauffeur immediately knocked him down and was kneeling on his stomach when I arrived. The two cooks were under arms, eyeing each other wildly and giving violent tongue. Belinda’s maids and Polly and Dewlap—Ivan’s man—were in support, reviling one another’s countries in terms which, had they been intelligible to those for whom they were meant, could not have been endured. I straightened things out somehow. Then I