"Mrs. 'Ill, you see, Mr. Bielby, keeps what she calls a Creek--that's a _crèche_! (We _must_ all go and see it one of these days!) It's in the World's End Passage, next door to a fried fish shop, and there are twenty babies, and the woman at the fried fish shop keeps an eye on them when Mrs. 'Ill comes in here on Wednesdays and Saturdays, that is, unless Jellies happens to be out of work----" "But the hens are the best, Amory--tell him about the hens----" they prompted. With that Amory was fairly launched. Mrs. 'Ill (she said) not only took charge of other people's babies; she kept hens also, in a sort of back scullery, and at tea-time they sat in her lap and ate winkles off her plate, and she said she felt towards them just as if they were her own! Hens and babies--_Figurez vous!_--And there was always a christening party or something at the Creek, to which the hens went too, and--(they _must_ listen to this!)--at one party they'd had, last Christmas, nobody'd been to bed for two nights, and Mrs. 'Ill had explained that they'd had to cut it short because of 'Ill having been dead only a week!---- "Oh, but about 'Ill--he hasn't heard about 'Ill----" "Well, her name isn't 'Ill at all, you see. That didn't come out till her husband died. His real name was Berry, or Barry, or something, and he signed the register 'Barry' when he was married. But it seems he'd been in the Army and deserted, and was afraid of being caught, so he called himself Hill. But (here's Westermarck for you!) when his first baby was going to be born his conscience seems to have been troubled (it would make a lovely psychological story, Mrs. 'Ill with the child and Mr. 'Ill with the conscience), and so he made a sort of bet with himself, that if it was a boy he'd give himself up, and if it was a girl he'd just go on being Mr. 'Ill and a deserter. And of course it was Jellies, and so Mrs. 'Ill's Mrs. 'Ill...." There was nothing of the snob about Amory. These were the people among whom she had moved during her painting of Saturday night scenes and street markets, and she did not pretend that they were not. And she had an undeniable gift for such narrations. Laura Beamish, who tried to cap her with some story of a Charing Cross flower-girl and a black eye, fell by comparison quite flat; and even Katie Deedes's tale of her mother's entrée-cook did not gain quite the same applause. And Walter Wyron's, about the ex-sergeant who had looked after his father's house-boat, was an old one. Yes, Amory liked people to be one thing or the other. But she did not tell any stories about Mr. Wellcome and Mr. Geake.