"I am miserable. Things are getting worse and worse. You have often scolded me for not taking things seriously enough. You little know me. Do men ever know women? Do they ever take women seriously? Don't they always fall back on the woman's instinct which they have invented as an excuse for their own silence and reticence? . . . "I have been to see Annette. Poor child! It has upset me. I should like to see you--to-morrow, if possible. Can you come? "Yours, M." She also wrote to Herbert Fry, on a sudden mischievous impulse which she did not take the trouble to understand, she enjoyed it so thoroughly: "I am going to be married, and I hope to come to London. This place isn't fit to live in, certainly not to be married in." Her pen scrawled triumphantly as she added: "Kind regards to Mrs. Fry. "Yours, M." She sent the letter to Mr. Fry's office address in London Wall. She did not know where he lived. * * * Basil Haslam came next day bursting with sympathy and high hope. Minna received him, for the sake of effect, in the kitchen. Like Charlotte, she was cutting bread and butter. She had sent the servant out on an errand. Basil came in very quietly, and made Minna think of a young inexperienced doctor cultivating a bedside manner. However, she repressed her desire to tease him and said: "I have learned my lesson." "What lesson?" "Something about a stalled ox." She scraped the butter very thin on the bread by way of heightening her own sensation of a chastening poverty. "We shall be very poor," she said. "Oh, Minna! I will make you rich." "I suppose there is a lot of money in London." "Will you come to London with me?" "Didn't I say so in my letter?" Basil was always literal. He took out her letter and read it again. "Stupid," said Minna. "I meant it if I didn't say it." She laid down the knife and the loaf and submitted to her lover's embraces. Basil could not contain his delight: "There's my one-fifty a year. I can make three hundred the first year, five hundred the next, a thousand the next . . ." "A thousand!" "We'll live in a studio first of all. Then we'll live in a house and give dinner to the dealers and editors. And then we'll live in a house with a studio and the dealers and editors shall give dinner to us." "That will be fun," said Minna. Together they carried the tea-tray upstairs and broke the news of their engagement to Mrs. Folyat. Frederic and Jessie Clibran-Bell were there. They had been conspiring with Mrs. Folyat to bring about a speedy wedding. With the assistance of Mr. Clibran-Bell Frederic had been taking work on his own account and had made fifty pounds in a year. Herbert Fry had assisted him by letting him act as his agent--on condition that he had Frederic's agency work in London--and now there was talk of his setting up in an office of his own, if his father could guarantee him one year's expenses.