While the tea for her solitary breakfast was drawing, Alice, having no one else to look at, amused herself by regarding her own natural--no term could be more appropriate--face in a large pier-glass, and was quite startled to behold the unmistakeably cross expression which characterized it. Taking herself to task for this, she, sipping her tea, which did not taste nearly so good as when Harry was at home, mentally decided that she was very unreasonable, and childish, and ridiculous--that when Harry had been devoting himself for the last month to her pleasure and amusement, going to balls and all sorts of places which he did not care a pin about, solely to please her, it was horribly selfish in her to grudge him a few hours to devote to a favourite pursuit--though how men could find delight in killing those poor birds, she could not tell. She did not so much wonder about other people; she believed men were generally cruel; but Harry was so unusually kind-hearted. She supposed it must be the excitement, and the beautiful scenery, and the interest in watching those dear, clever dogs stick out their long tails to point at the partridges with--which, looking at it in a Chesterfieldian point of view, was decidedly impolite, if not positively rude, of them; and yet she had heard gentlemen talk about their sporting dogs being so well-bred. Having thus reasoned herself into a wiser frame of mind, she resolved to make the best of it; and suddenly recollecting she had at least a thousand things to do, which she was continually putting aside till some time or other when Harry should be out, she decided that _this_ was _the_ time, and that now or never must they all be done. Accordingly, she set vigorously to work, and wrote three letters one after another, to three former schoolfellows, wherein she described her husband as a species of modern demi-god, compounded of equal parts of Solomon and Adonis, with a dash of Achilles thrown in to do justice to his heroic qualities; and depicted matrimonial felicity in such glowing colours, that the richest and prettiest of her correspondents eloped the next week with her music-master; and one of the others, who was neither rich nor pretty, turned pious out of spite, and went into a sort of High Church Protestant nunnery-and-water, to punish the men, who, it must be confessed, appeared to submit to the trial with the most cheerful resignation. Then Alice brought out a large roll of bills, and a thick house-keeping book, ruled with blue lines, and having a business-like smell of new leather about the binding, which Alice flattered herself would impress even the stately housekeeper (who was old enough to be her mother, and stiff enough for anything; and of whom Alice, in her secret soul, stood very much in dread) with a deep sense of her being a very dragon of housewifery, prepared to be down upon the slightest attempt at peculation like an avenging fury. But the bills were so complicated, and