"What an awful street you live in," said Minna. "Is it?" Annette had never considered it æsthetically. It was the place she lived in, the scene of her honeymoon. She had filled it with romance and held it holy. "Ma says," remarked Minna, settling herself largely in Bennett's wicker-chair so that she seemed to overflow it and fill the room,--"Ma says that she is quite sure Bennett will take to drink." "I don't believe Ma could have said anything so odious." "Then you don't know Ma." Minna took stock of the room, and she was divided between pity and contempt for her sister--pity that she should live in such a poor place, contempt that she should be satisfied and pleased with it, and she thought with a shudder of the day when the scales should fall from the lovers' eyes and they should see themselves as they were, in that place, as it was. Minna had so often opened her heart to love only to expel it on finding it ridiculous that she could not conceive of any affection as permanently seated. She was like an inept gardener, who might plant spring flowers in his borders and deem it natural and inevitable that summer and autumn should be empty of all save weeds. She had cultivated a taste for falling in love, and always lost patience with it before she came to love. She had come to ask Annette how she had contrived the more or less smooth-running of household affairs in Fern Square and Burdley Park, but found herself instead pondering marriage as here represented and also as applied to herself. She asked Annette what she did all day long. Annette told her: she sewed, mended, thought of Bennett, went out to buy his supper. "A little different from home?" suggested Minna. "Of course," replied Annette, "I'd like more people. It's hard to make it go all the day round when there's only one. But then, I read. I usedn't to be able to do that." "How did you manage at home? I can't." "I don't think I managed at all. Bennett says I'm an awfully bad manager. There were such a lot of things to do that they had to be done." "How did you make the servant work?" "I didn't. I did it all myself. If she did anything I generally had to do it all over again. She lit the fires in the morning and cleaned the boots and all the nasty work. I think in their own homes they leave all the rest undone." Minna rose from her seat and demanded to be shown the bedroom. This was very ugly. She made a wry face. "Do you like it?--being married, I mean." Annette smiled. Musingly she said: "What a silly question!" * * * Minna returned to Burdley Park little enlightened but uneasy and troubled. She went to the kitchen and worked, as she thought, very hard, and scolded the servant and lashed herself into a state of anger with things in general. By the evening she was entirely miserable. She sat down in her bedroom and wrote to Basil Haslam: