No one, however, has ever heard Nancy Fazackerly allude to the conjugal missiles that tradition has associated with her dinner table. She is, indeed, wholly silent about her short married life. She was twenty-seven years old, or thereabouts, when she married and went to live in London, and it was five years later when she came home, widowed and childless, to Cross Loman again. About everything else Mrs. Fazackerly talked freely. We all knew that she and her father were entirely dependent upon his tiny pension, and it was common talk in Cross Loman that Mrs. Fazackerly would sell anything in the world if she could get cash payment for it. Her astuteness over a bargain is only to be equalled by the astonishing unscrupulousness with which she recommends her own wares to possible or impossible purchasers. Many people disapprove of her, but everyone is fond of her, perhaps because it is a sort of constitutional inability in her to say anything except the thing which her fatally reliable intuition tells her will be most acceptable to her hearer. When she came up to tell Claire about her paying guest, she pretended that it was because she wanted to consult Claire upon the business side of the question. Claire, being naturally unpractical, and with far less business experience than Mrs. Fazackerly, was, of course, susceptible to the compliment. “I hope I have come to a satisfactory arrangement with him,” Nancy said. “I think so. Of course, I couldn’t bargain with him, and I’m afraid, being entirely new to this sort of thing, that I shan’t be up to any of the tricks of the trade and may find myself making very little, if anything at all, out of it. He is to have the little spare room, of course. It’s delightfully warm, now that we’ve got the radiators, though I don’t suppose anyone would want a radiator on in the summer, but still, there it is, and so I thought I’d simply make an inclusive charge for heating and lighting.” “Lighting?” “We only have the humblest little oil lamps all over the house, as you know, but I thought I’d move the blue china standard lamp into the spare room, and then it will always be there, although, with daylight saving, he will hardly use it, I imagine.” “I see.” Something in Claire’s tone indicated that she was wondering upon exactly what grounds Mrs. Fazackerly had contrived to base her claims to payment for a radiator and a lamp that would be required to perform no other functions than that of a diurnal _acte de présence_.