To anyone who has read the foregoing pages it will be evident that in starting housekeeping I was obsessed by two main ideas: one, that I was not to be a parasite; two, that I was to have the house to myself during certain portions of the day. Towards the end of my second year of marriage I began to pat myself on the back. But alas! It is this harmless exercise that seems to be more irritating to the gods than a thousand crimes. Congratulate yourself upon anything, from the affection of a millionaire uncle down to a recent immunity from colds, and you are lost. I had won a position of--I won’t say mistress, but comparative director of my cook; the fish came at my call. Clara never finished one room at a time, though we had established as one rule of the game that, if I got to my sitting-room first, she could not begin dusting until she found all the things I had lost during the past twenty-four hours. While she did this I sat in another room and got on with my work, which had such an exasperating effect upon her nerves that after a time she forbore to follow me, however slowly and aggressively I walked upstairs. As regards Mullins, the job gardener, I had got him into the habit of keeping entirely off the beds. He remained almost exclusively in the kitchen, where he did very little harm except to Ruth’s window-boxes, but she always said it was not much trouble to plant them again. She also said he was very useful in giving a hand with the knives, and in cleaning up. Asking Mullins to clean up anything seemed to me like inviting a baboon to tidy one’s wardrobe. In fact, the efficient female has scarcely spoken to me since she heard I allowed it. But then her life is a perpetual warfare. Leisure, self-indulgence, expense, moral latitude, wilfulness, tact, all these bright spirits, which are the making of any reasonable person’s day, fly before her as butterflies before a bird with a hungry family; it is a pretty sight. But to return to my boast. I reviewed these achievements with my mind’s eye. I was proud, and there was an end of it. Within a few months I no longer knew the meaning of leisure, and I had become a parasite, living on the habits of my son Tom and his nurse. All the other people in the house preserved their independence. When it became a question who should make the barley-water, it was my time, not Ruth’s nor Clara’s nor the nurse’s, that was wasted. Ruth, without taking her eyes off the range, said it would be better for anything of the sort to be made in the nursery for fear there should be any mistake. Nurse, without interrupting her work, wanted to know who was to watch the pan while she was folding the things in the night-nursery. It cost me a valuable summer’s morning to find a place in the domestic machinery where that pan might sit and boil without disorganising the day’s work.